Open Source in Finance Forum London 2024

Throughout the presentation, I dive into software supply chain attacks and explain how they unfold incrementally. By understanding the latter, attendees will learn how to analyse their firms' internal processes for software ingestion, integration, and testing to account for Supplier Risk both during and after deployment. Attendees will also understand how the risk-based model can respond to software supply chain attacks even when they are not detected until later in the internal software supply chain, and gain critical insight into the kinds of changes needed in their organisations' internal processes and software tools to support this approach.

As extreme weather becomes more frequent and severe, climate-related damages will increase, particularly within the least resilient economies that typically have the lowest carbon footprint. COP27 saw the framing of the UN’s Loss & Damage (L&D) fund to compensate for damage stemming from climate change. This presentation will outline Ortec Finance’s practical approach towards how the L&D could be executed to allow funding to commence and the important role open source could play in such an intertwined and complex resolution, showcasing Open Source Climate (OS-Climate) as an example of community collaboration in the field of physical climate risk and resilience. The ideas are developed in a recent Nature Comment: Climate loss-and-damage funding: a mechanism to make it work (nature.com, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03578-2)

Large financial institutions typically deploy their IT services across a number of private and public cloud providers. This asks for a platform-agnostic design of software applications to minimize the amount of rework required to migrate services between platforms. This applies to AI/ML models deployed for inference as much as any other software. In this presentation, we present an innovative framework ("inference-server") to streamline the deployment of an AI/ML model to the cloud. The framework is published by J.P. Morgan Chase at https://github.com/jpmorganchase/inference-server The framework abstracts the cloud infrastructure and connectivity aspects through a simple plugin system. This requires an ML software engineer to define an ML model as 2 functions only: 1) to load the model in memory and 2) to invoke that loaded model for a given set of input features. These 2 functions are then added to a Docker container image along the inference-server framework. This approach leads to a very modular design where an AI/ML model can be trivially tested in a development environment. If required the model could be deployed and accessed from any cloud computing platform.

ISDA & TradeHeader will demonstrate the use of APIs and the CDM to retrieve, validate, manage and use ISDA Floating Rate Option (FRO) reference data. Aided by a simple UI for demonstration, FRO ref data will be retrieved, visualised and interrogated. There will then be a demonstration of the use of such data to validate then calculate cashflows for an Overnight Interest rate Swap (OIS).

How can a company enable its developers to use any upstream open source, and remain confident it can close all the CVEs in that stack? Mark will present a new approach to open source maintenance and the open source supply chain, developed in partnership with major clouds and silicon providers to underpin their fast-moving enterprise AI offerings. The extraordinary breadth of innovation available as open source comes with the risk of unmaintained and unauditable systems. Our approach aims to give the widest freedom to institutional developers, while supporting the CISO in their mission to ensure security of the estate. Building on the latest ideas in distroless containers, the result is a significant leap forward for those who need the latest open source with long term maintenance and compliance commitments.

Join NatWest Group at the FINOS Open Source in Finance Forum to explore how NatWest intends to empower its engineers to contribute to open source through the innovative use of Git Proxy, a collaborative project contributed to FINOS by Citi. Delve into NatWest's strategic plans to implement open source practices, enabling enhanced collaboration, security, and efficiency within their open source contribution processes. The talk will demonstrate how financial services engineers can further develop and contribute to Git Proxy through FINOS to help grow the project's community and further accelerate financial services open source. Discover firsthand the anticipated impact of leveraging Git Proxy on NatWest's development processes and the broader implications for fostering a culture of open source excellence within the financial sector.

The essay "No Silver Bullet" was first published by Dr. Fredrick Brooks in 1986, and republished in the 25th anniversary edition of his seminal collection 'The Mythical Man Month'. The essay questioned whether it was possible to achieve tenfold improvement in software engineering productivity within ten years. This session offers insights on software engineering productivity from my own journey in computer programming, which began in 1976, leading to mainframe product development at IBM during the years Dr. Brooks first published his essay, then product engineering in ‘shrink wrap’ software and cloud native products, to current adventures in software engineering with Google’s Duet AI. As a mainframe programmer I spent my time very differently than I do today. Software estimation and productivity metrics have evolved, but are elusive and even controversial. We've come from a mythical man month to mythical '10x programmers'. Will AI bring us 10x improvement? With the help of Google's Duet AI, we will explore whether we’ve finally found the silver bullet.