Open Source in Finance Forum London 2024

The AI Readiness SIG (special interest group) launched at the beginning of May 2024 as FINOS Member Only SIG, with the goals of mutually developing a governance framework that manages the on-boarding, development of, and running AI-based solutions within financial services organizations - allowing financial services organizations to unlock the potential of this disruptive technology in a safe, trustworthy and compliant way. This panel may discuss, among other ideas:

• How do banks address not only the technological challenges created by AI adoption, but how to also prepare to address the impending regulations that financial regulators will impose on FS organizations, as the regulators try to understand the technology as well. Because as an industry we share unique challenges that the vendors, academics, and startups are not going to solve for us on their own.
• How generative AI presents some new challenges that existing, mature on-boarding technologies in banks may not be well suited to addressing
• Starting to define ‘safe and responsible” use of AI (where safety considers both the customer and the bank)
• Considerations to be made for use-case driven risk modeling, threat analysis, mitigation strategies, and alignment with regulatory expectations.
• Forward thinking on how FS organizations attempt to rapidly adopt new technologies as they emerge
• Next steps a SIG should look at to advance quickly, but safely through this new minefield

Real-world asset tokenization (RWA), or the digitization of physical or traditional financial assets represented on a blockchain, is gaining significant traction across industries. Led by organizations such as abrdn, alongside numerous web3 projects, 2024 is expected to be the breakout year for RWA.

Tokenization has the potential to change asset ownership, trading, and management as we know it - providing benefits such as enhanced liquidity, transparency, and efficiency. This is why leading organizations across traditional finance, real estate, payments, and other industries are experimenting with and implementing this powerful functionality.

This keynote will explore the current state of RWA today and its potential future, including the opportunities and challenges in implementing RWA. Join us as we explore the new frontier of finance and investment, where real-world assets converge with blockchain technology to reshape the global economy.

Speakers will discuss urgent challenges faced by the financial sector and companies across the economy in compliance, risk management, and solutions investments related to the climate and biodiversity crises and other urgent sustainability problems.  As longtime members of both OS-Climate and FINOS, Goldman Sachs and Red Hat will describe how the combined strengths of the two communities working together will magnify their ability to enable development of data, analytics, modeling, and regulatory solutions.  Capgemini will discuss how it and the growing group of technology and service providers in the communities can drive widespread adoption of the OS-C and FINOS open source technologies by their customers across financial services and business.  The speakers will address how all this together will generate business value for members, customers, and stakeholders of OS-Climate and FINOS while also delivering greater climate and sustainability impact.  

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.

Diversity is a cornerstone of innovation, driving better outcomes in technology and innovation. Despite the known benefits, gender diversity and equity continue to pose challenges in software development in financial services and beyond. Open Source is a crucial space for addressing algorithmic fairness, and FSIs have an outsized influence on society, so focusing on this sector is set to be game-changing.
As the Open Source Foundation for Fintech and part of the Linux Foundation, FINOS has a strategic DEI initiative focused on how financial services & open source communities can best adapt to tackle these issues. Since launching in 2022, the DEI SIG has achieved strong momentum, increasing awareness and the participation of underrepresented groups at our annual & community events. For 2024, we have set further goals to create expanded SIG leadership and contributor opportunities, prioritize plans to develop, advance, and retain diverse talent, and ensure that FINOS projects and software development are inclusive and diverse.
Our panel will explore strategies and actions to foster meaningful participation, create inclusive environments, and address the biases that having non-diverse teams and skewed data can unintentionally drive into software applications and AI models. Drawing on the best practices of our members and AI fairness/accessibility experts, FINOS will share best practices on tackling bias around new Gen AI models and software to avoid bias, drive inclusion and ensure conformance to regulation such as the ethical and responsibility standards set forth in the AI Act and beyond. Equally, we will draw on FINOS' forthcoming AI and DEI work, bringing together FSIs and tech players to ensure that trust, inclusion, and safety are at the heart of AI and software development and raising the bar towards a more equitable and inclusive future in tech.

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.

NatWest Group provides engineers with the latest tools and mechanisms that enable them to make informed choices about how software is architected and delivered by leveraging its Enterprise Engineering and Hosting Solutions capabilities. During this keynote, Ted will explore how NatWest Group is adopting an “Open Source First” approach to engineering through the adoption of Git Proxy for external OSS contribution and by leveraging Open Source licenses to provide more engineering solutions to NatWest Group teams.