Finos (Fintech Open Source Foundation), a nonprofit whose mission is to foster adoption of open source, open standards, and collaborative software development practices in financial services, today announces the addition of three established fintechs to its already growing membership roster of prestigious financial institutions, technology companies and global consultancies.
The companies include: EPAM Systems, Inc., a product development, digital platform engineering, and digital and product design agency; NearForm, an open source solutions design and delivery company; and CloudBees, a provider of DevOps solutions.
"New technology, especially open source, is no longer an additive to the financial services industry--it's something that firms, large and small, must fully embrace in order to stay competitive," said Gabriele Columbro, executive director of FINOS.
"These new members, EPAM, NearForm and CloudBees, deliver innovation via open source technology, and will be key additions in helping FINOS further open source adoption in the industry."
Institutions have long recognized the need to adopt new technologies in order to stay relevant in a rapidly changing landscape and are now acknowledging the necessity of leveraging open source to achieve this. According to a 2019 BDO study, 97 percent of financial services firms are making significant progress on digital transformation, and 21 percent of companies list developing a digital transformation strategy as their top digital priority. As a result, open source has become center stage as banks, capital markets institutions and others recognize the value in its ability to improve efficiency and reduce costs.
EPAM Knows Open Source is Critical to the Future of Finance
EPAM, a leading global provider of digital platform engineering and software development services, officially joined FINOS in October 2019. The firm provides deep digital banking transformation expertise to a variety of financial services companies through its business consulting, UX design, enterprise architecture and software engineering capabilities. As a top open source contributor, EPAM understands the importance of open source, especially in the financial services industry, as many platforms developed for digital banking are based on open source software engineering libraries and systems.
"As the financial services sector faces increasing regulatory pressures, rising customer expectations and digital disruption, open source solutions can help financial services companies accelerate time-to-market while freeing up resources to focus on innovations that provide a unique business value," said Balazs Fejes, Executive Vice President, Co-Head of Global Business, EPAM. "As a FINOS member, we will continue to share the benefits of open source software with our financial services customers with a common goal of driving digital transformation."
NearForm are on a mission to drive forward global contributions to Open Source
Joining in November 2019, NearForm are the single biggest contributor to the Node.js Runtime, and are leading experts on Javascript performance - they are responsible for over 1 billion module downloads each month from NPM. NearForm develops and maintains popular performance-oriented tools, such asClinicJS and libraries such as Fastify and Pino.
NearForm sees a major opportunity to grow global contributions to open source by helping the financial services industry understand how to contribute to and support the movement. NearForm is now helping organizations transform their innovation capabilities through InnerSource programs, which is led by Danese Cooper, who formerly held the roles of Chief Technology Officer of Wikipedia and Head of Open Source of PayPal.
Cian Ó'Maidín, CEO and Co-Founder of NearForm commented: "We are really excited to join FINOS. We believe that our work with FINOS will help foster greater contribution to open source, and will greatly benefit financial institutions across the globe."
CloudBees has Open Source in its DNA
CloudBees enables developers to focus on what they do best: Build stuff that matters while providing peace of mind to management with powerful risk mitigation, compliance and governance tools. Joining in December 2019, CloudBees believes that open source is a core tenet of the future of technology and finance, and their passion to revolutionize how technologists operate strongly aligns with FINOS' philosophy of developer empowerment. CloudBees' FINOS membership ensures that they will continue to contribute to the devops, financial and open source communities.
Open source has become critical to building effective infrastructure for financial institutions, and the addition of these three fintechs to FINOS is emblematic of a new commitment to addressing industry-wide technology needs with the power of open source solutions.
"The conversation around open source used to be a sensitive one, as many firms were skeptical of its true ability to drive innovation and increase overall collaboration," added Gabriele Columbro at FINOS. "Now, that rhetoric has almost entirely dissipated - the discussion has changed to, ‘how can I become even more involved in open source?'"
FINOS added 7 new members in 2019 taking total membership to 33 financial services, technology and services companies that are committed to growing open source in financial services.