How Open Source Is Transforming Finance

Forbes

a day ago

Ismail Amla, Senior Vice President, Kyndryl Consult.
Once the domain of idealistic developers and technology companies, open-source software is now deeply embedded in Wall Street's core infrastructure. Even global banking institutions—a sector traditionally risk-averse and intensely protective of intellectual property—are now using code they don't entirely own.
Open source has become a strategic imperative, impacting the ability to move faster, build better and attract top engineering talent. Across investment banks, retail institutions and payment firms, open-source tools and platforms are valued not just for reducing costs but driving innovation and freeing teams to focus on what sets them apart.
A Growing Alliance
To this point, the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), a nonprofit housed under the Linux Foundation since 2020, now counts more than 100 members, including key financial institutions such as Citi, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, along with tech titans such as AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud.
These firms have long adopted foundational components of open source, including the Linux operating system, MySQL and other open-source frameworks like MQTT. For some time, technologists at these companies have actively contributed to and maintained general open-source projects, including the Kubernetes container orchestration engine.
From Contributors To Collaborators
Fintech engineers and financial firms are increasingly collaborating on open-source, finance-specific tools to share the load of building complementary services, leaving those who don't at risk of falling behind.
According to FINOS data, GitHub commits from financial services professionals jumped from 429,000 in 2021 to over 751,000 in 2024, roughly a 75% increase. The report also found that the amount of time engineers are spending on open-source contributions at work has doubled since 2021. As of 2024, 46% of organizations surveyed are allocating work time for open-source software development.
This has yielded a growing list of open-source projects benefitting the finance community. Platforms like JPMorgan's Salt user experience solution and Goldman Sachs' Legend data life cycle platform were born inside individual firms, but once open-sourced, became catalysts for broader industry collaboration and evolution. Instead of every institution reinventing the wheel for non-differentiating capabilities, many are now pivoting to sharing the load.
The New Standard Of Shared Standards
Open source is also an efficient way to address industrywide standardization challenges that no single firm can or should solve alone. For example, the FDC3 standard has created an open API for financial desktop interoperability, enabling applications from different vendors to talk to each other.
The financial services community came together to create the Common Domain Model, which has become a widely accepted open standard for harmonizing data for trading, reporting and compliance. These open standards help reduce integration costs, improve transparency and future-proof core systems in the face of changing regulation and technology.
A Magnet For Top Engineering Talent
These open standards also play a critical role in the race to attain the brightest and best. Open source has become essential to attracting and retaining engineering talent, and public code contributions give engineers portable, verifiable credentials that help strengthen their career mobility.
At the same time, developers value the ability to work on impactful tools used across the industry, not just behind corporate firewalls. Standardized toolchains and common frameworks also increase skills portability. Developers moving between firms can ramp up faster, reducing retraining costs and making teams more productive. This is a major reason why many financial services companies now view open-source participation as a requirement.
Other Benefits
The earlier cited FINOS survey reported that 84% of survey respondents say open-source work delivers business value and 88% say it improves software quality. Concerns about open-source security have largely subsided due to the dominance of Linux as the operating system of choice, with the concurrent development of open-source security practices that, likewise, share the burden and can even improve risk by empowering faster root cause analysis and quicker fixes.
Goldman Sachs, Citi, Morgan Stanley, Bloomberg and others have institutionalized open-source policies through dedicated open-source program offices (OSPOs), shifting contribution and open-source development from an exception to a norm.
By sharing the foundational burden, firms are left with more time and resources to focus on their special sauce: user experience, artificial intelligence platforms, execution algorithms and more. It's a striking shift with some irony: The most competitive firms in finance are collaborating on core infrastructure, so they can better compete where it really counts.
Looking To The Future
As competition heats up with numerous new entrants and an explosion of new service types, open source becomes even more critical within fintech. Just as cloud adoption became a table-stakes requirement a decade ago, open-source participation is quickly becoming a baseline requirement for speed, adaptability and talent retention.
I encourage leaders within finance to find ways to contribute to open-source projects as a way to help shape and build them.
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