Finos (the Fintech Open Source Foundation), a nonprofit foundation promoting open innovation in financial services, today announced the launch of a new Program focused on Decentralized Ecosystem Growth (DEG).
Amber Baldet, CEO of Clovyr and former Blockchain Program Lead for J.P. Morgan Chase, revealed the Program in London during her keynote at FINOS’ annual flagship Open Source Strategy Forum - the only conference dedicated to open source in financial services. IHS Markit, FINOS Gold Member, will sponsor the program with Baldet serving as the first Program Management Committee (PMC) lead.
“Our vision for this Program is to build an open community that works together to reduce development complexity for decentralized applications in financial services and beyond,” said Baldet. “The focus of the program is building a high-quality collection of modern, open-source tools that businesses can use to address today’s real business problems in novel ways, beyond the hype of the ‘blockchain use case.’ The financial industry is just beginning to understand the transformative—and potentially disruptive—power of decentralized applications for both tokenized assets and data coordination. They’re also experimenting more with powering more and more mission-critical applications with open source software. FINOS, sitting at the crossroads of these worlds, can provide the ideal environment for the program to thrive.”
“IHS Markit is a strong supporter of cross-industry initiatives focused on accelerating the pace of innovation in financial services technology,” said Brad Levy, CEO of MarkitSERV, Global Head of Loans at IHS Markit and Board Chair for FINOS. “As a Member and active contributor, we believe FINOS and the open source community are well positioned to drive collaborative approaches to solving technical challenges emerging in decentralized ecosystems.”
“Too much of the work around decentralized applications is, somewhat ironically, focused on just one technology, stack, or, say, in the case of cryptoassets, one blockchain,” said Rob Underwood, FINOS Director of Programs. “The DEG program will allow financial services firms to not only collaborate to iteratively evaluate, deploy, and build technology across firms, but also to do so in a way that looks across and considers different technologies, including disparate decentralized technologies.”
The Program will be seeded with contributions from Clovyr, IHS Markit, and other FINOS Members. DEG is actively seeking both individuals and organizations to contribute and collaborate under the transparent FINOS governance by contribution model. Individual contributors, firms and other organizations are encouraged and welcome to participate and propose new ideas and contributions via the Program lists.
“Collective ownership and governance issues are the two key factors preventing full adoption of decentralized applications,” said Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director of FINOS. “By providing a reliable technology platform to build distributed applications with established open source governance and principles, FINOS is dedicated to enabling complex and distributed technologies to be collectively developed and deployed.”
This announcement follows yesterday’s launch of the Data Analytics Visualization Program and contribution of Perspective from J.P. Morgan, reinforcing FINOS’ position as the trusted forum for open innovation in fintech and a level playing field for financial institutions and financial technology providers of any size. Other recent FINOS Program launches include Data Technologies (“DT”), Open Source Readiness ("OSR"), FinServ Developer Experience ("FDX"), and Financial Objects (“FO”), as well as the expanded contribution from GreenKey Technologies to the FINOS Voice Program.