Open Source in Finance Forum London 2025

Open Source in financial services has entered a pivotal new phase. No longer just individual tools and formation projects, key FINOS projects are forming a connected, strategic layer in banking technology stacks and the interdependencies are growing.

This talk explores how projects like Git Proxy, FDC3, the Common Domain Model, Common Cloud Controls, and AI Readiness are building momentum across the industry and how they increasingly rely on each other. What’s emerging is a shared, collaborative infrastructure built by and for the financial services industry.

But with that adoption comes responsibility. We’ll unpack why financial services firms need to invest in contributing to FINOS projects and why it’s important for teams and internal stakeholders to know the Open Source embedded in their systems.

We’ll also highlight the growing importance of Open Source training across the industry, particularly in security and software supply chain practices as fundamental skills for modern engineers.

This is a call to action for more contributors, more maintainers, and more champions. The Open Source stack in finance is no longer optional. It’s infrastructure.

S&P Global will be presenting a real-time implementation success story in standardizing and revolutionizing Test Automation Framework in Financial Services using Open-Source Principles in partnership with FINOS. Cafe X, which stands for Centralized Automation Framework Enabler, is an open-source Python testing framework developed by S&P Global in response to the identified inefficiencies in the fintech industry's testing processes. This innovative framework aims to streamline QA and testing efforts, ultimately saving valuable time and resources. Unlike other frameworks that focus on a single testing layer, Cafe X provides comprehensive multi-layer testing capabilities, enabling seamless testing across various layers, including User Interface (UI), Application Programming Interface (API), Database, and data-related tests. This case is joint effort between S&P Global & FINOS to bring the best for Open Source Community.

Join us for an engaging lightning session that will delve into the complex challenges of managing Open Source and InnerSource initiatives within a highly regulated landscape. We will examine how to establish effective health assessment criteria that encompass maturity, success, and adoption metrics. This strategic approach empowers organizations to anticipate the evolution of their InnerSource and Open Source projects, equipping them to handle potential breakups—such as allocating InnerSource costs among subsidiaries across different jurisdictions—and promising breakthroughs, including successful transitions from InnerSource to Open Source.
Participants will gain valuable insights into best practices for fostering collaboration, ensuring compliance, and safeguarding intellectual property while driving innovation. Discover how to navigate regulatory complexities and unlock the full potential of Open Source and InnerSource strategies to propel your organization’s growth and adaptability.

Open source thrives on engagement, yet sustaining long-term contributor involvement remains a challenge—especially within large companies. In this talk, we’ll share how we built a strong internal open source community by recognising and rewarding contributors, reinforcing engagement, and fostering a culture of participation. We’ll walk through the strategies we implemented, from career growth opportunities to conference travel incentives, and the use of gamification. In addition, we’ll showcase how we measured the impact of these efforts, demonstrating how recognition fuels retention, innovation, and long-term commitment to open source. Attendees will leave with actionable insights on how to cultivate a contributor-first culture within their own organisations, ensuring open source contribution remains a core part of their company’s DNA.

Open source is transforming the financial services landscape in the UK, from accelerating innovation to enhancing regulatory compliance and reducing vendor lock-in. This talk explores the current state of open source adoption across banks, fintechs, and regulatory bodies, highlighting key trends, successful use cases, and emerging challenges. We’ll touch on the role of open collaboration, the importance of community governance, and how UK institutions are balancing openness with security and compliance. Whether you’re a developer, a decision-maker, or simply curious about the open source shift, this session offers a snapshot of where the industry stands—and where it’s headed.

In this 15-minute talk and live demo, we'll walk through how small failures in financial systems can lead to big inconsistencies—and how Durable Execution helps teams prevent them. We'll simulate a real transaction system under failure conditions and you'll observe how a Durable Execution platform enables the application to overcome them and complete successfully—despite intermittent failures, service outages, and even a crash of the application itself.

If you've ever had to build your own safety nets around stateful operations, this talk is for you.

You'll see how Durable Execution lets developers focus on business rules, not retry loops or recovery glue and why this shift matters for building reliable, maintainable financial platforms.

The demo will use Temporal, an open source Durable Execution platform with broad adoption by the financial industry.