Nikolai Stankau, Director Business Development, EMEA Financial Services at Red Hat, the world’s largest enterprise open source solutions provider.
Banks and financial services have long been benefiting from using open source software, which is code that is developed in a decentralised and collaborative way. Open source software is cost-effective, flexible, is developed rapidly, and tends to have more longevity than its proprietary peers because it is developed by communities rather than a single author or company. According to Red Hat’s own research, 93% of IT leaders in financial services state that enterprise open source is important to their organisation.
Alongside adopting open source products, which many banks already do, there’s opportunity for these organisations to have a greater influence in the development of industry software, by engaging in ‘upstream’ open source community projects.
The advantages of engaging in upstream communities
In open source projects, code is developed as a shared process by a community of thinkers and developers anywhere in the world. Collaborating directly with these communities – what’s known as ‘upstream’ participation – can give banks a major competitive advantage on their journey to innovate. From there, software can either be downloaded at no cost, or consumed via a trusted open source vendor that secures and stabilises the software to make it suitable for an enterprise to use. This is also known as the ‘downstream’.
A company that contributes its developers’ time and resources to an open source community gets rewarded with the output of hundreds of developers working on the same code. This leads to a magnification effect, by virtue of the fact you’re expanding your team many times over while also benefiting from a much more diverse pool of talent. The result is that organisations can be captains of the product development process and work together with the community to design features and functionalities that meet their needs and keep up with customer demands.
An added benefit for banks engaging in these communities is it provides a great access point for sourcing new talent, as well as helping to retain existing talent. Developers are attracted to organisations that engage in upstream development because it allows them to be at the forefront of open source innovation and new community-led initiatives.
It’s common for multiple organisations in the industry to come together and collaborate on a project, which can drive significant benefits for the community as a whole. A good example is Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), which is a community set up by banks to promote industry collaboration, by delivering software that addresses common industry challenges and drives faster innovation. The concept had its origins in Symphony, a open sourced messaging and collaboration tool that was adapted and improved upon by developers from other banks, ultimately helping the company to become a major business valued at around $1.4bn.
Where to join forces versus compete
Although the benefits of engaging in upstream communities are manifold, some organisations have concerns around intellectual property as well as the productivity of developers contributing to open source projects rather than exclusively working on the bank’s own proprietary software. To this latter point – in reality, the development of new solutions and features built inhouse often requires many months, whereas product ideas shared in a community setting can be executed in much shorter time frames. As the saying goes, many hands make light work.
Regarding the essential consideration of IP and competitiveness: a lot of where banks can differentiate is at the application layer; in the services they develop and offer, rather than at the underlying operating system or middleware foundations – these tend to be common and standard, and are what empowers organizations to get to market as fast as possible. Thus the greatest opportunity for banks lies in platforms such as Linux-based Kubernetes, which is now the industry standard for container orchestration and one of the most important technologies used in the financial services industry. Kubernetes attracts many contributors from diverse organisations all over the world.
Some IT leaders also recognise structural roadblocks: transitioning an organisation to new ways of thinking and operating is a process that isn’t achieved overnight. Not all banks have the legal or tech mechanisms in place to be able to share their code externally, and company policies can prevent their employees from engaging in open source communities. In a heavily regulated industry, it takes time for some organisations to create the necessary changes before they can harness the potential of upstream communities.
The future is open
As the software ecosystem expands, and in the face of accelerated digital transformation driven by the ‘new normal’ of the COVID-19 pandemic, banks and financial services have the opportunity to evaluate how they can get involved in open source. There are many ways to do this: they can invest financially in communities, provide technical leadership and resources, or contribute code. With organisations under more pressure than ever to gain a competitive advantage, playing a role in open source communities will help them create better products, speed up time to market and position themselves at the forefront of financial innovation.
