James McLeod, FINOS | Open Source Summit Europe 2022

This is texturing TV. All right, guys, welcome back. We're at the open source Summit in Dublin.

We're talking with James McLeod. We're gonna be talking about financial services industry and how they're working with open source software because as we all know those guys got some unique requirements James welcome to show hi. It's really great to be here.

It's great to be here with everybody both in person who say virtually So the challenge with open source in financial services is what exactly what makes them worthy of having this dedicated function within the Linux Foundation compared to any other vertical industry. Yes. So that's actually really interesting question.

So financial services for a very long time. It's been very regulated and lockdown so much so that I'm it's been baked into our engineering culture that you know, people shouldn't peer inside our Repose or contribute to coach. You know, that doesn't belong to a specific team but when it comes to digital transformation and devops and you know ups and Cloud migration and the direction of travel within, you know software engineering in in general, it doesn't lead to like any efficiency or acceleration.

So what we're doing within Finos is teaching Banks, you know how to feel safe, you know contribution and collaboration together both the inside the banks and then also outside, you know in the open source world. Because there aren't enough engineers in the world. You know, how are we going to achieve what we need to achieve if everyone's you know, fixing the same problem multiple times and so that's what finals does, you know, we're all kind of financial services engineering experts.

We've been in the field, you know with the people on the ground and we're here to you know, kind of bring people out of that shell and into the open source world. So that kind of sounds like therapy. So what do you guys doing that faster those conversations?

How does it happen? Yeah, so you kind of fight fight it on two fronts. And so when you're talking about therapy, it's actually really interesting because a lot of Engineers who actually work in banks have two different lives.

They have their I'm an engineer for a bank Persona and then they have their Meetup, you know their hackathon their open source contribution outside of work Persona. And so when you're talking about, you know, therapy it is, you know, how do we actually merge those two worlds together? How can I be James the open source contributor, you know working in a bank As well as that person.

He kind of goes to JavaScript meetups or you know Cloud meetups and then you've got the other side which is like the top down air cover, you know perspective which is about communicating with executive directives and c-suite board members about the benefits and cost savings and efficiency gains in the acceleration of Open Source, you know and kind of Bridging the Gap between the noughties perception of you know, closet back closet kind of developers, you know, throwing code over the fence. So what it is now, which is, you know, people just contributing code outside of organizations as you would do in any other team and so we work on both sides we convince the stakeholders and we also educate and Council kind of like the engineers on the ground as well. Has the rise of fintech companies kind of change the way people think about open source in the financial services space because it feels like there's a lot more competition now between you know these emerging startups and these larger Enterprises that have been around forever and the larger Enterprises are now trying to figure out how do those guys get so fast?

Yeah. So that's some also really good question. So what we find is within fintech and Rich Tech a lot of the firms here are actually out there.

Are they contributing impact to the industry that does some one specific or multiple things, you know, really? Well the banks actually want to leverage So within the open source space what you can do is come together around standards and interoperability, you know to actually help the fintex work with the banks a lot better. So within Finos for instance, we've got a registered especially interest groups that bring Banks together with The Regulators about you know, how do we actually provide the information Regulators need in order to Engineer faster, you know, can we provide evidence in an automated fashion rather than rubber stamping kind of like paper as it used to be and the same in like the interoperability World.

We've got various different standards that allow data to be passed across, you know, the financial desktop and potentially through apis one of the projects that we have that does that is fdc3, which is extremely popular to like the desktop and interoperability world and we have competitive vendors in the fintech space, you know, who wouldn't you know share ideas in the IP space actually collaboration around the interoperability. They know that they need a common standard for passing data around so they can share data because they might be kind of engaging in the same banking environment and ecosystem. So there's plenty of space to do things, you know, super simple and also really fun as well and I see you guys have that same Financial Services nomenclature for things that most other people wouldn't know what that meant.

It yeah. As we go along here. Do you think that they're Regulators are going to come and start looking at how the software is constructed or maybe they are they're just looking for ways to do that more aggressively.

We hear a lot about open source software Supply chains and the financial guys are probably the most regulated people in the world. So is this where that focal point of that conversation is going to be because these guys are going to be asking the toughest questions. Absolutely and I like to think the I mean we're working with open ssf.

In fact next week on the 29th of September. We're doing a virtual webinar between men's Morgan Stanley and open ssf and I'm going to be there kind of, you know, bringing the panel together an introduction introducing the webinar. Because we want to have the banks in those types of conversations, you know, we want to have you know, a firm like mens, you know, who is actually automating, you know cve scanning for instance with Morgan Stanley on the same panel and also with open ssf, you know talking about that whole Space of you know, how do we actually trivet Traverse our you know s bonds, you know, what is spdx, you know, and how do we actually engage with it?

So we're not kind of playing catch up to that. We're actually kind of demonstrating our know-how to The Regulators who Are actually catching up in terms of engineering, you know, we also want to bring them, you know on the journey with us and to reason why we have a regulation Innovation special interest group, which kind of ties you know, how can we actually provide evidence to them in an automated fashion so we can speed up engineering and speed up the way that we're regulating, you know the banking industry. How will this connect to other initiatives that the Linux Foundation has launched we heard about the open digital wallet this week.

Yeah are these kind of thing is they're overlap between these conversations as we go along and part of your effort is just help with the collaboration there because the financial services people are all over digital wallets. Absolutely. So just by being here at the open source Summit, you know, you're you're in amongst the rest of the Linux Foundation, you're kind of sharing ideas on the Fly you're being really creative with the way that you're solving technology problems and we had, you know people saying, you know, what is your relationship, you know with the open Wallet foundation and so one example of this is I'm Royal O'Brien came to the final stand talking about the metaverse, you know, so how will Financial Services actually interact with the metaverse, you know, is there a way that you can actually have you know payments, you know within an Oculus Rift as you were kind of moving around the metaverse, you know kind of buying things off the peg or you know, however you you know, make payments and digital wallets kind of came into that, you know, because we need to be able to standardize the way that things are done, you know, so you can buy things using a digital wallet both within the real world maybe using internet of things but also in the virtual world as well and without coming here and being in person at a health event, like open source Summit Europe, you wouldn't have these types of conversations and so where things May have seemed like a world apart when you actually start bringing it together and talking, you know, in the same room you think well actually, you know, the difference between all of these different foundations combined isn't that big?

You know, there are things that we do around, you know, interoperability and standards and passing data around there can be applied anywhere. I think it's not uncommon to go to visit Wall Street or any of these being exchanges and you'll find thousands of developers working on stuff. What is your sense of how much or what they're really doing is differentiated value versus just Reinventing the same thing for different companies in the same wheel and maybe it's time to have this conversation.

Well every single Bank including a bank that I used to work for, you know before moving to the Linux Foundation has a digital transformation program, you know where they're trying to consolidate and speed things up, you know, they're automating using devops. They're actually progressing into phenox, you know in kind of those different worlds. And their mutualizing kind of like all of those different duplication of effort, you know across the inside the bank in order to speed things up for themselves.

I mean, but if you then take you know, where all of those digital transformation efforts the speeding things up inside an individual bank and then play that across the entire industry. There's absolute, you know, kind of duplication of effort. There's loads of money.

They can be saved across the industry. I've got absolutely no doubt whatsoever. The you know, there are Engineers sitting opposite each other in the same teams who are kind of Reinventing the world Reinventing the will without speaking to each other.

It's going to be everywhere and they're working from home now. So yeah, it could be even worse. do we need to walk through to the business side to explain to them that this is a good thing and it's okay because a lot of them would look at it and say we're writing code and we're gonna do what give it away.

Yeah, I funnily enough that has been raised within one of our special interest groups. So regulation Innovation is the coming together of lots of banks. So we've got Morgan Stanley in there.

We've got JP Morgan in there, you know, we've got lots of we've got UBS and City all coming together to discuss Rich Tech, you know solutions to problems and one of the questions that we posted them, you know, trying to one block, you know, and get things done faster. If there's anything that we could do to help you, you know from within your banking environments, what would it be? And the the answer they came back wasn't a technology problem.

It was like a business communication problem. It was like if there's something that you can do, can you provide a facility to be able to explain to our product owners and the people, you know who sign off all of this type of you know advancement in technology what it is that we're solving so the business comes with us on the journey as well as the technologists and so absolutely talking to business owners in the same language is the business owners is an absolute priority for us. How do people get engaged short of calling you up and booking a therapy session?

What exactly do they have to do? And how do they participate? Yes a final seasons on GitHub.

com/finos, we've got a organization of banking contributed projects and also firms, you know who are related to banking like consultancies and other you know firms, you know who want to contribute their projects into an open source landscape so you can find us there. All of our readings are up today. We also have our special interest groups in those repositories as well.

So if you want to come and talk around a particular subject matter of banking such as devops such as regulation Innovation open source Readiness, so if you're a bank and you want to start contributing to open source, we actually collaborate with to-do group. So within open source Readiness, we look at like the vertical, you know, Policy decisions and compliance there needs to be sold for a bank to be able to contribute to open source, and then we work with them today group on, you know, the types of information that you need to create an open source program office see, you know, all of this material and how to join finless projects can be found, you know on GitHub or you can go to finaster or you know, which is our you know primary micro website, you know, where we have a community calendar with all of their projects that you can just scroll through and you can find the zoom details all the WebEx details, you know and just drop in everything's free and open. You don't need to be a funeral member to go there.

You can follow us on Twitter, you know say go find Fitness foundation on Twitter the same on LinkedIn you can subscribe, you know to our news feeds. I'm also you know, very Was it communicative across both as well? So you can follow me and I'll put things out there that people can like and share and you know, I tag finals and other things into these as well.

All right, folks, you're hurting here. This might be the least expensive counseling session. You'll ever get James.

Thanks for being on the show. It's my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

All right, we'll be back in a little bit guys.