The Symphony Foundation is an open source foundation focused on financial services and fintech. It has over 60 open source repositories and 300 contributors working on projects across 4 working groups. The foundation aims to make the financial sector's culture more open by creating an open developer platform, enabling lines of business, and addressing challenges around what to open source, why to open source, and gaining buy-in from decision makers. It sees an open platform as benefiting the whole ecosystem by allowing vendors to focus on their core value while avoiding lock-in, and giving end users interoperability and the ability to customize their workflows.
2. ~60 Open Source Repos
300+ Contributors
4 Working Groups
27 Member Organizations
2 Individual Members
@symphonyosssymphony.foundation
4 Working Groups
27 Member Orgaizations
@symphonyosssymphony.foundation
An industry-wide open source foundation
See live community reports at symphonyoss.biterg.io
• Open source projects
• Member-run working groups
• Conferences, meetups, and other
events
• Member-directed research &
advocacy
3. @symphonyosssymphony.foundation @symphonyosssymphony.foundation
• Independence
• Transparent Governance
• IP management
• Quality & security checks
TRUST GROWTHEXPERIENCE
Why a dedicated open source foundation for financial
services?
• FinServ & FinTech focus
• Tested collaboration policies &
workflows
• Developer experience
• Community management
• Network building
• Events & promotion
• Advising & enablement
4. @symphonyosssymphony.foundation @symphonyosssymphony.foundation
Cultural
Default closed to
default open,
community RoE
Legal
IP, regulatory
Technical
OSS supply chain,
security-conscious
workflow
✓ Open Source Readiness WG
✓ Open Developer Platform
✓ Partner with open source community
experts
The FinServ Open Source Challenge
What to
Open Source?
Why
Open Source?
Line of Business enablement
Challenges
Value
Decision Makers enablement
5. @symphonyosssymphony.foundationsymphony.foundation @symphonyoss
Wall Street is finally ready to collaborate
• Increasing engagement & contributions
from top-tier banks
• Desire for flexibility & avoiding vendor
lock-in
• Growing coverage in financial press
• Massive interest at Open Source Strategy
Forum
7. @symphonyosssymphony.foundation @symphonyosssymphony.foundation
The whole ecosystem benefits from open platforms
AN OPEN PLATFORM
OPEN SOURCE
• Commoditize to
compete
• Community/customer
contributions
• Scalable GTM
• Focus on Core
Value/IP
• Avoid vendor lock-in
• Lower total cost of ownership
• Workflow self-determination
• Security compliance
• Contribute toward needed
features
YOUR VALUE PROPOSITION
THE VALUE LINETHE VALUE LINE
PLATFORM PROVIDER END USER / INTEGRATOR
Agile and Iterative
Collaborative customer relationship
NETWORK DATA APPS
COMMUNITY
Open Ecosystem
I am gabriele Columbro - executive director of the symphony software foundation.
While I have spent a life in open source, between community and commercial companies, I don’t come from the financial services industry per se. While you could probably say I come from the Valley, that Italian part of the Valley, I guess :)
So when I started as ED of the Symphony Software Foundation less than 2 years ago, I knew a few things about this industry, but had to learn a thing or two about the world of Financial Technology.
I knew there’s amazing technology in this ecosystem but I learned that’s still highly siloed. And I learned that post trade workflows can take days if not weeks. I learned about over time consortiums, standard bodies, working groups tried to build co-opetition models - with generally different degrees of success. And finally, I’ve learned that Open APIs were still a quite new thing for the industry, but - and that I already knew - open source was still looked at with diffidence.
But, I quickly learned that, between Fintech platforms enabling entirely new channels in the ecosystem and disruptive disintermediation source technologies like blockchain, the industry was in the midst of a revolution, one that is bound to drive entirely new business models. One that requires a deep questioning, from each player in the ecosystem, as to what it means to build and consume financial technology.
So, having the luck to seat with some of the largest financial institutions and financial technology vendors, starting a high stake and collaborative in nature use case like the Symphony platform, we realized the massive opportunity to provide an environment where faster innovation could happen by the means of efficient open collaboration between firms on their technology strategies.
But one thing I DID know when I joined was that it was not going to be easy.
In fact with great opportunities come great challenges, and especially in regulated industries, as we probably all have experienced - there are great challenges in collaborating across the firewall.