Open Source in Finance Hackathon NYC 2025 Recap

Written by Karl Moll | 12/16/25 7:35 PM

Mid-October, FINOS members across financial services and technology participated in the Open Source in Finance Hackathon NYC 2025, organized by FINOS & hosted by AWS, proving what's possible when cross-industry teams collaborate in the open by delivering tangible solutions at remarkable speed.

Designed as an intensive two day sprint, FINOS & AWS encouraged the developers to think about the event as more of a “hackathon workshop” as opposed to a competition with the goal of demonstrating how much progress we can make by collaborating in the open. Hackathon participants developed solutions in one of 4 tracks - unlike previous FINOS events, there was a single team per track and developers were encouraged to join teams with members of other companies in order to build common solutions to common financial services problems!

FINOS & AWS were very pleased to see that three of the four tracks were cross-firm teams, and the winning team was completely made up of developers from different organizations!

“We were thrilled to see how much progress small teams of builders could make on these projects in a day-and-a-half. That the winning team was comprised of multiple cloud providers and customers collaborating is testament to what we hope to see from our FINOS membership.”

— Adam Honoré, Head of Financial Services Service Development, AWS

Tracks & Team Composition

The four tracks that developers built solutions around were all centered around FINOS projects:

Project Description	Participating Orgs	Submitted Solution
HTC - Grid: An open source project for managing high-performance computing workloads at scale, providing a reference implementation for a scalable grid computing solution on AWS.	AWS	The team built a new user interface for job visibility, enhanced observability dashboards with filtering capabilities, and designed a roadmap for Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) support to handle complex task dependencies.
FDC3: An open standard for interoperability between applications on the financial desktop, enabling different applications to share information and work together in a seamless workflow.	Bank of America & AWS	Developed a security extension integrating AWS KMS to cryptographically sign and verify context data, ensuring that messages passed between applications originate from trusted sources.
TraderX: A reference implementation of a cloud-native microservices-based financial trading application, designed as a sandbox for developers to experiment with new technologies and architectures.	Capital One, ISDA, AWS & Microsoft	Delivered a two-part solution: a branch management strategy to simplify the project's learning curve (e.g., distinct branches for "baseline" vs. "production-ready" with Postgres), and a full refactoring of the trade service to integrate the FINOS Common Domain Model (CDM).
OpenGris: An open Standard for Grid Resource Scheduling, with client and worker standards to tie resources together and share them in a cost-effective and climate friendly way.	Citi & AWS	Demonstrated a scalable, multi-backend solution by integrating the Scalar reference implementation with both Symphony and AWS EC2, enabling dynamic provisioning and tear-down of compute resources based on workload demand.

The Winning Team

While all teams delivered impressive code contributions, the TraderX team stood out to the judges.

TraderX is a lightweight reference implementation of a cloud-native, microservices-based trading application. It is designed as a sandbox for developers to experiment with new technologies and architectures without building a sample application from scratch.

Embracing the event’s collaborative spirit, the TraderX team combined expertise from four different organizations to modernize the project's infrastructure. Their contribution was a two-pronged success:

They solved the "Visualization & Branch Management" challenge, creating a strategy to reconcile major tech stack changes and feature additions.
They achieved a significant milestone by contributing code that integrates TraderX with the Common Domain Model (CDM).

The resulting project provided a solution for complex state management—vital for an open source project with multiple tech stack branches—while simultaneously using TraderX to showcase the power of CDM in an industry sandbox. Check out the team’s hackathon presentation:

The team members utilized their diverse range of experience across FINOS open source projects, financial services, and technology to build an impressively feature rich code contribution & presentation:

Will Tsai (Principal Product Manager, Azure Incubations, Microsoft) drew from previous experience in reconciling major changes to the TraderX tech stack from last year’s OSFF NYC Tech Sprint, where his team built a proposed TraderX feature path to enable application deployment using the CNCF project Radius (which was an inspiration for this hackathon challenge), in order to tackle the Visualization & Branch Management challenge proposed by the TraderX maintainers
Brooke Gerry (Technical Account Manager, AWS) entered the Hackathon with limited exposure to FINOS projects and ended up both presenting & contributing significant code to the integration between TraderX & Common Domain Model
Eleonora Acuna (Assistant Director, Digital Solutions Management, ISDA & OSFF NYC 2025 Coaching Award Recipient) provided domain expertise from being a maintainer of the FINOS Common Domain Model open source project, as well as connecting the team with CDM expert & ISDA Technical Consultant Alston Antao who provided additional remote support during the hackathon
Gábor Lipták (Distinguished Engineer, Capital One & recently elected FINOS Technical Oversight Committee member) brought open source & financial services experience to the team from being a top contributor to the FINOS Fluxnova project

We are incredibly proud and motivated by the work of all the participants in the Open Source in Finance Hackathon NYC 2025 and we look forward to seeing how the teams & participants continue to build on top of their Hackathon contributions!

If you are interested in participating in future FINOS Hackathons, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter, join our community mailing list, and learn more about our projects! The next FINOS Supported Hackathon will be the Innovate.DTCC: Industry-Powered AI Hackathon (Feb 23-26, 2026) - Registrations are now open until Jan 23, 2026.

Links to related projects:

TraderX
- https://github.com/finos/traderX
Common Domain Model
- https://www.finos.org/common-domain-model
HTC-Grid
- https://github.com/finos/htc-grid
FDC3
- https://fdc3.finos.org/
OpenGRIS
- https://github.com/finos/opengris

Author: Karl Moll, FINOS

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