 Hi, this is your host, Sapil Bharti and we are here at Open Source Summit in Dublin and today we have with us Gav Vialekalabru, your executive director of FinOS. First of all, it's great to have you on the show. Thank you for having me here. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, let's get one thing out of the, how do you pronounce it? FinOS, FinOS, because we were sitting down, you're trying to correct me, so I want to get it on record so everybody will know how to pronounce the name. So that's a really interesting question because there's a lot of debate and confusion about the name of FinOS. I, with my outrageous Italian accent, pronounce it FinOS. Maybe an American native will probably pronounce it FinOS, but that's it. It's not FinOS, it's not FinOS. Talk a bit about what was the origin of the project? What was the pain point that you felt, hey, we need something like that? It's very interesting. It's a story near and dear to my heart. It's actually, I wouldn't say a long story, but it's certainly a multi-step story, if that makes sense. So I had the honor to be selected in late 2015, early 2016, to be the executive director of what was called, at the time, the Symphony Software Foundation. So some of the largest investment banks in the world, including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank City, some of the largest asset managers like BlackRock, Citadel, some of the main technology vendors like Standard & Poor's, NASDAQ and so on and so forth, came together to build a communication platform that was called Symphony. They were supposed to be proprietary, but with a major open core component. And so these banks created a common non-profit foundation, at the time Symphony Software Foundation, to really steward the open source code of the Symphony platform and build common solutions on top of this platform, common apps. Think about this communication platform as sort of a replacement for Bloomberg, for example, for the Bloomberg terminal. As we started collaborating, and of course this is an industry, not only its financial services, but its investment banking, meaning the closest of the industries, as we started building trust amongst these very senior board members, these institutions, like I had the CTO of Goldman Sachs in my board, it became very clear about 18 months into the journey that there was a much broader opportunity to go after. Financial services technology is a huge amount of technology. One of my board members, any of this firm, probably has 10 or 20,000 developers working for them. It's just an ungodly amount of developers. I don't know what you do with that. But anyway, we realized, as I've grown up in open source, that financial services had as much to benefit from open source collaboration as pretty much any other technology industry, technology-centric, software-defined industry, had seen so much innovation from open source in the last 20 years. My pitch was really, hey guys, there would be no cloud without open source, there would be no blockchain without open source, there would be no big data without open source. If you pair that with the fact that this is an industry that is very much in a talent crunch, the whole U.S. is in a talent crunch, but developers, well, that's at least until six months ago, definitely want to work more for the Silicon Valley than for financial institutions that potentially don't even allow them to foster their own profile through open source. That was the clincher. In 2018, we became Finos, we rebranded, we launched at the Nasdaq market site in April 2018. And since then, we've seen a major momentum of growth. We started having banks contribute, major contributions from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, now UBS, Tafila was honestly unprecedented until a few years ago. And that got me into a couple of conversations with Jim and the Linux Foundation. So in early 2020, just weeks before the pandemic, we, with our board, we agreed to join the Linux Foundation. And so Finos became basically the financial services arms of the Linux Foundation. And it's been a wonderful ride since then. We have probably doubled the number of our members. We grow 30-35% a year on a number of contributors. You know, it's been a match made in heaven. How are you seeing the evolution of the FinTech industry? Because a lot of folks are still, you know, because this is the most mission critical, you know. It's not, you know, you can very easily move. They have legacy. Some banks are like 200 or 300 year old banks. So talk about what are the challenges that the FinTech industry is facing. And how does, you know, Finos, I almost said Finos, how does Finos, you know, kind of help them? Yeah, so I think it's important to distinguish FinServe, you know, financial, large financial institutions and incumbents from FinTechs, like pure play tech startups that deliver to a financial use case. The challenges are very different and, you know, sometimes the press loves to peg them against each other, but in the end they will participate to the same, you know, value chain. So as far as the incumbents go, as far as the large financial institutions go, you know, we sort of touched on talent. Talent is a major concern in these institutions and it's really driving a lot of open sourcing. Many of these companies over the years not only, you know, have the tendency to think that everything that they built was their competitive differentiator, everything that they built was the best. And in some cases there is some really cool technology that don't get me wrong, you know, think about high-frequency trading, think about, you know, quant and algorithms, investment algorithms. But the reality is that the rest of the world has moved on and has understood that especially as you're delivering a service in the SaaS world, you know, maybe 10, 20% is your sort of competitive differentiator. Everything else is really plumbing. Think about all these major SaaS players, open sourcing, sort of their core data stores, Cassandra, Hadoop and so on and so forth. So many of these companies have built even like programming languages internally. And so think about how hard it is to source talent for a proprietary programming language. All of the programming languages are open source and there's a reason for that. So talent is for sure a major challenge. From the income standpoint, I think, you know, over the last 10 years we've seen margin shrinking, you know, margins of no, top line is nowhere nearly where it was before the 2009 crisis. In response to 2009, the bottom line costs of regulation has gone drastically up. And so margins have shrank. And so there's not, you know, enough money to just continue throwing money at the problem. And so really that is creating challenges in terms of efficiency, cost-cutting, and so on and so forth. So, you know, between talent, between cost-cutting, those were sort of, I think, the two clinchers that have pushed more and more these institutions to open source. On the FinTech side, you know, these are, I would say in large cases, not your typical tech start-ups. I have a personal grievance of the fact that they're not really using the open core model. They're not, I don't see, I'm just really starting to see some of them, you know, leveraging open source has strategic part of their go-to market and business model. Like we see so often in the Silicon Valley, but even in Europe, you know, there are many open source companies that went public or got acquired in the last three or four years, you know. Of course, Github and Red Hat, but, you know, Elastic, Confluent, GitLab. And I'm not seeing the FinTechs being as, you know, ready to adopt the open source commercial model as I would have expected because, again, these are funded by similar venture capitalists. But on the other hand, culturally they come more from a financial service, kind of the background of, this is our stuff, you know. We will give out our secret sauce if we open source this bubble sort algorithm, you know. It doesn't make a lot of sense. And so if I want to identify the problem that does sort of affect the whole ecosystem because, again, think about an investment, this is all connected. You can't really analyze this in the vacuum. Integration is definitely the main problem. This is an industry that has had standards, but it hasn't had de facto open source standards and open source reference implementations for these standards that has created over time fragmentation, tender lock-in, and therefore there's a risk that as we move from centralized finance to, you know, DeFi and FinTech, we're going to move from a centralized silo to a decentralized mess where you really need to have point-to-point connection across those little FinTech offerings. And so that's what we're trying to solve for through FINOS to create not only standards, but also open source APIs, data, and rules. So when I listen to you, it looks more or less like the, as you said, the kind of FinTech startups or new companies, the challenge seems to be more on the cultural side as much because they come from back home. And culture of people is one of the biggest problems to solve always. Technology solutions are there. So what are you doing? Probably it's the people, it's not the computers. Right. So what initiatives are there, outreach programs are there? Because as I said, you know, you cannot just put that code on GitHub. Absolutely. You know, admittedly, especially between 2016 and 2019, most of what we did was advocacy because, you know, as a vertical foundation, focused, I think we're very unique. I think you mentioned Elef Energy. There's another good example. You know, Automotive Grade Linux is another example. But generally, most foundations are, you know, horizontal. And so when I think sort of about our focus, our vertical focus, when we started, you know, in the first two or three years, most of what we would do was education, was enablement, was what we call open source readiness. It was really trying to make them, first of all, from a strategic standpoint, making their executives understand why they should be doing open source. You know, talk about talent, talk about cost reduction, talk about innovation. And then help them from a legal, cultural, and sort of technology tool chain standpoint to be able to remove the barriers effectively for their developers at their workstation to be able to contribute to open source. Because the reality is, a developer at any of these financial institutions five years ago could not access GitHub. Or maybe they could do a get on GitHub, meaning read. But they couldn't do a post, meaning they couldn't write or ever contribute. And so, we started very early on what we call our open source readiness program that has, as I said, different components including culture. We actually spun off an inner source special interest group that is actually looking more at the cultural aspects within the firewall. Like, in some of these organizations, even internally, there's very little code sharing, you know, building on top of each other's achievement is also something that they're not culturally accustomed to do, even internally. And so, open source readiness, inner source SIG, and as we then joined the Linux Foundation, we're trying to work more and more with the to-do group, which I think you're probably familiar with. It's our Linux Foundation-wide initiative for members, free for members, to increase the efficiency and the sort of strategic value of their OSPOS, their open source program offices. So I think between open source readiness initiatives in Phoenix and more mainstream, if you want, activities of the to-do group for those organizations who already have OSPOS, therefore have already recognized sort of the value of open source. Those, I would say, are the main initiatives that I would point you to. This actually reminds me of my own early days of journalism, you know, like 2005, around that. The whole focus of the stories we used to do was why you should do open source, what value it brings not only to your product, but also your teams. So it looked like this industry is kind of stuck in that phase and we have to do the same things, unfortunately, again. But the thing is now, back in those day, Linux Foundation was also not there and the models were not there. They were trying to figure it out, but now there are so many success stories out there. And also Linux kind of paved the path for companies to commercialize open source because before that it was free software was there and everybody will frown at the term. I am not going to give anything for free. So I think that the things have changed a lot, but a lot of efforts need to be done there. It's so interesting that you say so. Before I say my take, I'll ask you a question. When did you think you were having those conversations, those type of conversations with other industries, how long ago? About converting to open source, you know, why doing open source? How long would you estimate that? No, I started my career later on, but I said after I finished, it was 2005 or something like that. Exactly. 15 years ago. 15 years ago, more than that, yeah. Fun enough, 15 years is always my sort of estimate as to how behind financial services. I really found myself doing exactly the same conversation that I was doing with other industries years ago. And I think that is, you know, I don't want to shoot on financial services. That is part of the regulated nature. For better or for worse, regulation makes that these organizations, it's harder for them to innovate. They are very risk averse organizations and therefore, you know, the balance, the skew between cost and benefit of taking additional risk and try to change the status quo, it's not there. And so I'm actually very impressed of what the industry has been able to achieve in the last five years because the macro pressure is also, I think, as much as I would love to take credit for what we've done and my fantastic thing primarily does in Finos and our community. I think also the macroeconomic conditions and the realization that financial services are fundamentally a technology industry that every bank, you know, wants to be a technology bank like Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, I think said it two or three years ago, that realization has made so that they now want to participate to open source. And I think this is also, you know, arguably part of the fact that they are hiring more and more from the West Coast, especially when you look at the Americas, you know, you're seeing more and more executives from Big Tech being poached into financial institutions, you know, lured with massive compensations packages, but that is indeed changing the culture. These people come from companies that are absolutely comfortable, familiar, well not just comfortable with open source, but they actually know how to use open source to drive their strategic technology goals or even business goals. And so this is, I think, also helping sort of closing the gap, if that makes sense. So I think maybe with more around seven, eight years right now delay. But I hope you will not have to wait for 15 years, right? Oh, for now. It will be much more faster. Oh, for now. Right. Do you folks like planning to do your own events or you already do your events? We do. So as to, because the best example would be the use cases where when big banks come and talk about that inspire, you know, those startups and other industries look at that. Hey, look, they are already doing it. This is how it's done. Otherwise, they don't have any model to follow. Almost as if we had prepared this interview. Absolutely. Yeah, we do have our major event. We're now at the sixth here. Actually rebranded this year used to be called the open source strategy forum. This year is called the open source in finance forum, which is probably even more specific to what we do. It is produced by the fantastic Linux Foundation events team, which puts together this amazing show every year. And we just had our largest event in Europe in London in July in the city of London, of course. And that was over 300 people joining us for what was, you know, an amazing event. And then we're actually going to have our next instance in New York, December the 8th. Of course, London and New York are the two main venues for us. And fun enough, our major focus is to have banks on stage presenting real life usage of our projects. This is something that honestly we didn't have the luxury to be able to do until two or three years ago. A, because we didn't have yet substantial projects that would be used in production. B, because, you know, many of these firms are press shy. And so this is honestly another aspect that Phoenix brings to the table. We are so lucky to be connected with several of these executives through a relationship that is friendly, meaning we're not a vendor. We are aligned with their goals. And so they feel a bit more comfortable, you know, coming on stage with us. And, you know, now we see them using projects like FDC-3, our interpretability standard to collaborate with each other. We're starting to see, you know, the other side of the equation come in. Asset managers, you know, the buy side versus the sell side. And if two guys start collaborating on common APIs, common standards, common regulatory implementations, well, that's sort of a self, you know, sustaining organic community. So we're getting close and I hope to see as many folks as possible in New York in December. I would expect at least 500 people. Gabriele, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about, of course, the Linux Foundation Europe and Finals Project. And I would love to have you back on the show, maybe in person or remotely. But I'd really appreciate your time today. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me here and I hope to be here with you again either in Dublin or I'll see you in California, maybe.