Latest Class of Members Underscores the Development of a Modernized Financial Technology Landscape and its Commitment to Open Source Technology

NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / November 10, 2021 / FINOS, the Fintech Open Source Foundation, announced today at its annual Open Source Strategy Forum in New York, six new corporate members, bringing its membership to 55 members. BMO Financial Group (BMO) joins as a Platinum member, with Kim Prado, CIO, US - BMO Capital Markets, joining the FINOS governing board. WhiteSource joins as a Gold member, Synechron as a Silver member, and EDM Council (EDMC), International Securities Lending Association (ISLA) and the Mojaloop Foundation as Associate members.

FINOS added 27 corporate members in the last 15 months, a nearly 50 percent increase, evidence of the growing central role open source is playing within financial institutions, consulting companies, open source companies and industry consortia. The open source movement has been rapidly growing since the beginning of 2021, demonstrated by the contribution of 10 new projects to FINOS in the same period.

"The adoption of open source technology in financial services is a way to bridge the gap across all firms in the financial ecosystem and power the next wave of developer-driven innovation," said Gabriele Columbro, executive director of FINOS. "A reflection of our community, each of these industry leaders come from diverse backgrounds and strengthen the corporate diversity of our support as we continue to provide a level playing field for every constituent in the industry. We also expect to bring more fintechs and regtechs into our community, given the tremendous commercialization and go-to-market potential of our projects."

BMO, the 8th largest bank by assets in North America, is on a customer-led shift to digital maturity that is changing the business of banking. It joins FINOS as the newest Platinum member. Kim Prado, former Governing Board Member and Vice-Chair of FINOS, re-joins the FINOS Governing Board.

"Rather than reinvent the wheel over and over, financial firms have an opportunity to sustain innovation and build efficiency with open source technology development and operations," said Kim Prado, CIO, US - BMO Capital Markets. "The FINOS Governing Board is providing essential leadership to help foster an open and collaborative community, bringing together all players of the financial services industry. I'm excited to rejoin the community in my new role."

FINOS looks to focus on "developer-centric financial services modernization" in 2022, with specific attention to areas like cloud services certification and DevOps mutualization. Newest Gold and Silver members WhiteSource, the leader in open source security and management, and Synechron, a leading digital transformation consulting firm focused exclusively on the financial services industry, bring added value to this specific strategy.

"The growth of compliance initiatives and regulations are causing significant changes to the way financial organizations use technology," said Ori Bach, executive vice president of product at WhiteSource. "WhiteSource's FINOS membership will help us further advance industry-leading standards in open source security governance and compliance."

"We are excited to join FINOS and its industry-leading members in their efforts to promote open source, pan industry technology development that recognizes future needs," said Faisal Husain, Co-founder, and CEO of Synechron. "We look forward to collectively paving the way forward for the financial services industry and beyond using our shared knowledge, and innovation skills toward modernization efforts for cloud services, DevOps and more." He added, "The Synechron team is ready to offer its financial services expertise and work with FINOS on their Compliant Financial Infrastructure and Compliance for Cloud Data Management Capabilities (CDMC) projects."

FINOS is also welcoming new Associate members to the community. This includes EDMC, the leading trade association for data management and analytics; ISLA, a leading industry trade association representing the common interests of securities lending and financing market participants across EMEA; and the Mojaloop Foundation, which advances the financial inclusion mission of the Mojaloop, an open source project aimed at empowering organizations to design more inclusive digital financial services.

EDMC will concentrate on CDMC (Cloud Data Management Capabilities) compliance and open-source regulation projects by partnering with FINOS to develop the first open-source suite created to accelerate cloud compliance processes. ISLA will expand value across data standards and interoperability, and both will work with FINOS on its overall goal to bring together fintechs and financial institutions through open source. The Mojaloop Foundation will collaborate with FINOS in helping financial services firms in developing countries learn more about open source readiness through FINOS' Open Source Readiness Project (OSR) and designing open collaboration models with regulators and the regtech community through the FINOS' Open RegTech Initiative.

"FINOS is playing a very important role in fostering best practices across the evolving financial technology landscape as developments like open-source technology, cloud data management and analytics become more sophisticated. We were very excited to introduce an open-source testing suite for our CDMC framework last week to help accelerate trusted cloud adoption," said Mike Meriton, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at the EDM Council.

"We're very pleased to become a member of FINOS; this membership represents the next step in moving towards a true open-source contribution model for the Common Domain Model (CDM) for securities lending markets," said Andrew Dyson, CEO of ISLA. "That strategy we outlined earlier in the year, as we collaborate with fellow financial industry associations, ISDA and ICMA on a cross-market standard for capital markets transactions, lifecycle events and processes. Open-source communities represent a way of achieving faster development of and convergence on such standards, and is key to a wider adoption of the CDM. We look forward to working with all of FINOS' members and consumers in the near future.

"To make the world more financially inclusive, we need to all work together to make payment systems accessible, affordable and interoperable to connect 1.7 billion new customers," said Mojaloop Foundation Executive Director Paula Hunter. "Mojaloop's open source software serves as a blueprint for organizations to design inclusive, interoperable digital push-payment systems. We look forward to collaborating with FINOS to further advance the ecosystem's journey toward open source readiness and designing open models with regulators and regtech companies."

In just over three years FINOS has established itself as the industry forum where financial institutions, technology and services companies, standard bodies and consortia, and regulators have drastically increased their collaboration through open source. Companies have been able to address critical areas such as data standards and interoperability, Open RegTech, and overall financial stack modernization through open source collaboration on the FINOS platform.

"There's a clear appetite across the financial services industry to leverage open source technology to create solutions to industry-wide challenges," said Jane Gavronsky, CTO of FINOS. "We've seen peers interact and build on each other's ideas using the open source venue, something that was once thought to be impossible. We're honored to help the industry realize the possibilities and benefits of open source technology through FINOS collaboration."

To learn more about joining FINOS as a member, visit the Membership Benefits page. Meet the FINOS team in New York City this week at its annual Open Source Strategy Forum.

About FINOS

FINOS (The Fintech Open Source Foundation) is a nonprofit whose mission is to foster adoption of open source, open standards and collaborative software development practices in financial services. It is the center for open source developers and the financial services industry to build new technology projects that have a lasting impact on business operations. As a regulatory compliant platform, the foundation enables developers from these competing organizations to collaborate on projects with a strong propensity for mutualization. It has enabled codebase contributions from both the buy- and sell-side firms and counts over 50 major financial institutions, fintechs and technology consultancies as part of its membership. FINOS is also part of the Linux Foundation, the largest shared technology organization in the world. Get involved and join FINOS as a Member.

Media Contact:

Stephen Sumner
Caliber Corporate Advisers
stephen@calibercorporate.com

SOURCE: FINOS