Newsletter

New members, new standards and more

In this issue of the FINOS newsletter, as we approach one year since FINOS was launched, we celebrate the continuous growth of our Community, highlighting notable achievements across a number of our programs and our continually growing roster of members.

From releasing new standards for the financial desktop, to providing guidance on open source license compliance to discussing the evolution of decentralized ecosystems, we've got it all covered. Read on to learn more and find out how to get involved:

Deepening Open source engagement in 2019

Does 2018 already feel like a distant memory? Surely it's been more than a month since you were gathered around a table with friends and families, catching some sun, cruising some slopes or just enjoying time to yourself. At FINOS we did enjoy some time off but have been back to work reflecting on the successes and challenges of 2018 and figuring out how to help the financial services industry move the needle of open source engagement in 2019. It's hard to believe we started this exciting journey only 9 months ago....but we have some evidence, so check out our oldie but goodie, FINOS launch keynote!

Read Q4 2018 highlights below, which include the launch of three new programs and a fantastic OSSF.

2019 is shaping up to be an exciting year and we hope you will get involved. With 11 active Programs (working groups and projects focused on a specific area) and new Members and participants joining every month there is plenty to discover and deliver. Look for more announcements soon about our programs and events and get in touch if you have questions or can't find what you are looking for.

We hope that you've found your groove again after summer. Here at the FINOS Foundation, we've been pushing hard to get our programs and events ready for our members and prospective members. This newsletter is just a sampling of what's on the horizon for the foundation, and our members.

Message from Gab, FINOS Executive Director

Dear Community,

Summer is finally here. We hope you are all enjoying the great weather and some downtime from your day jobs.

Welcome to our second FINOS newsletter since our April launch. This is written to keep FINOS members, program contributors, project consumers, and the wider financial services industry updated on news and events in our foundation and among the fintech open source community.

Dear FINOS (formerly Symphony Software Foundation) Community,

On April 24th at NASDAQ in New York we announced a new vision for our Foundation and Community: in response to the growing demand of our Community to support open source collaboration in the financial services industry at-large, I am proud to announce our Foundation is now FINOS, the Fintech Open Source Foundation.

And, as if that wasn’t enough, we also announced the addition of several exciting new Members: UBS, Github, Red Hat, Nodesource, Thomson Reuters now bring us up to 30 Corporate Members (and counting)!

Open Source Has made its entrance

In 2017 the financial services industry asked: What is open source and why does it matter? This interest in open source itself is a huge milestone for an industry filled with legal and regulatory hurdles. Not only was open source a topic of interest in 2017, but banks and FinTech start-ups took it a step further – realizing the benefits of collaboration, they began to embrace open source and integrate it into their core strategy and value proposition. Read Open Banking Starts with Opening Bank Culture and The Symphony Software Foundation: Bringing Open Source to Wall Street to hear more about these exciting changes.

It has been right around 6 months since I last wrote about the state of the open source projects hosted by the Foundation and I figured it was high time to revisit the topic and share a mid-year update. In January’s post, I concluded with a teaser of some work that, at that time, was just getting under way:

“We are currently investigating what it would take to provide soft real-time metrics (initially for projects) to project teams, the community, the ESCo and ultimately, the Foundation Board, and have identified a number of intriguing solutions in this space.”

What an exciting first year of activity for the Symphony Software Foundation! From a standing start a year ago, we’ve accelerated over the course of 2016 to become one of the larger open source communities within the financial services and technology industries. Now that the team, governance and processes are in place, we’re looking forward to building our momentum through 2017.

It was only 3 months ago when we started this journey to bring Open Innovation to the messaging & collaboration ecosystem around the Symphony platform.