Nigel Abbott, Regional Director North EMEA, GitHub
Covid-19 has vastly accelerated the demand for innovation in the financial services sector, and FS companies of all shapes and sizes are increasingly relying on open source software to underpin their innovation strategy. An open approach to software development allows them to react faster to market changes, provide better digital services, improve infrastructure, and unleash the full potential of their engineering teams.
But it’s fair to say that, for all its benefits, open source has not historically been adopted by the FS industry as quickly or extensively as it has in other sectors. Conservatism and misconceptions have impacted adoption – such as concerns about perceived security risks and question marks about losing competitive advantage by sharing code.
However, open source adoption in FS is on the rise, led by a major rise in the implementation of “innersource” among financial institutions. This allows FS companies to harness the skills of developers who are accustomed to using open source tools, and brings these inside the company firewall, providing a secure internal platform for working collaboratively on projects. FS organisations are recognising the business benefits of working within a community of like-minded people to share expertise, code and reuse workflows, safe in the knowledge that any nonpublic code will remain securely within their environment.
For the FS industry, adopting an open source software development strategy has transformative benefits that can accelerate innovation:
Open collaboration brings more ideas to the table
The essence of open source is that projects can accept contributions from anyone, anywhere in the world. By opening your project to a worldwide community, you tap into extra brain power and expertise to help solve problems. It brings more ideas to the table, meaning teams are better equipped to innovate. And critically, there are more people inspecting code for errors and inconsistencies. Problems are found and fixed before software makes its way into production, helping build more secure, more reliable software.
Developers don’t have to start from scratch
At risk of stating the obvious, developing software from scratch is time consuming – and FS companies with an innovation roadmap do not have the luxury of time. An open approach, however, can significantly reduce time to market for new services. By making it easy to find and reuse code on a broad scale, businesses can avoid wasted resources and duplication. As well as the ability to discover, customise and reuse existing projects, teams can also establish and build on a shared set of documented processes to optimise the way organisations deploy and use software. Not only does this approach reduce the time impact, it can also lead to lower costs, greater flexibility, and an end to vendor lock-in.
Transparent decision-making builds process, trust, and alignment
Opening up development projects brings a new level of transparency to the business. It is not just the code that is visible to every user – the process and decision-making behind it is visible too. Because all successful open source maintainers document their decisions by default, each conversation has its own URL and a history of comments for context. Not only does that mean developers on distributed teams can get up to speed and get building faster, but it opens the door to greater collaboration with wider stakeholders, such as product managers, designers and security teams.
Contributing to the open source community pays dividends
Contributing to the open source community is crucial to keep it healthy and thriving. In turn, a healthy community, with collaboration at its heart, helps fast-track innovation. By creating a shared sense of community, project maintainers can motivate a wider cross-section of the organisation to get involved in projects. Incentivising greater involvement from across the business leads to better ideas, which will pay dividends in fostering a culture of innovation.
Core development teams strengthen a project’s process
One of the attractions of an open approach is that it gives companies access to a global brain trust. But for innersource projects, distributing control across a smaller group of participants can make approvals and reviews more effective, and expedite the development process. Open source projects may have thousands of contributors and community members, but making a much smaller team responsible for the project’s overall direction gives the best of both worlds.
As FS businesses evolve and differentiate their products and services, they are realising that traditional development methods and tooling do not give them the speed of development they need. The status quo is not necessarily fit for purpose when it comes to expediting innovation. Open source – and innersource – is the ideal route to catalysing innovation by helping teams build software faster and work better together.
