 Hello, everybody and welcome to this short and I hope interesting talk called open for business. I'm going to explore some of the emerging trends and I guess accelerating drivers around open source open banking and what I call the open data ecosystem or economy that's becoming more and more important. My name is Gerald shop. I'm head of propositions at near form. And I want to give you a very brief background on near form just for context. So we create software solutions and deliver them support them for enterprises and large organizations. We also help with capability and what we mean by that is we help enterprises get to a more modern architecture set of tools technologies and governance. A lot of this is that is around open source, particularly around the front end. We are lucky in that I guess we've been a remote first company that's part of our DNA for the last 89 years, and that's helped us to I guess not miss a beat during this pandemic. We've been able to just roll on as normal. We're also very lucky over the last decade or so to have worked with some great clients all around the world and lots of different sectors and segments. And we find that bringing the ideas and experiences from one sector to another is always well received and very useful for clients. In terms of open source. I think we can justly claim to have some credits here. Again, going back to the pioneering duties of Node.js where the company initially started a lot of this and have contributed greatly over the years. In fact, we run NodeConf every year and right now, as I'm speaking, the conference is ongoing and virtual conference this year for two days for engineers to and architects to exchange ideas around that area. More recently, we've been working around what we call an approach to the front end we call Polaris, which is a single code base based around react react native to deliver solutions to iOS, Android, and web from from a single code base and there's been more about that later because it's relevant to financial services and open source. And of course we've used that same approach in the last nine months to deliver COVID tracking apps national and state apps to nine different jurisdictions. So everywhere from New York and Pennsylvania and Delaware right through to Scotland Gibraltar Ireland Northern Ireland so a whole range of states and countries. Open source around that and the tools and the technologies we've used has been donated. We've donated it to the Linux health foundation under the name of COVID green so if you look on gate up slash COVID green you can find the code there, we're hoping that will help to a lot of countries or states to in the fight against COVID. Our engineers love to engineer and love to collaborate and they have over the years created their own products which are in use in the open source community products like fastify which would be very well known. So I guess for a software company, we do have a lot of background and open source and we do use open source in the projects wherever it's appropriate. So looking at open banking and what the context is here. This is my own slide I did work in banking technologies in the 90s and saw some of the move from legacy and monolithic bank it into digital banking to step back a little bit from that I'd say that the the early 20s into digital banking very much have been to the benefit of banks. It's a more efficient way to deliver services than true physical branches, and that has spurred on a lot of the move to web it's actually being easier and cheaper for banks to do that way. And it's certainly at the start of using application programming interfaces or API banking, and I explained some of that in a while. Certainly, certainly part of that is to benefit banks as well and actually getting access to their own data. More and more though, and it's hard to believe this is only since about 2015 because it's such a big impact. We've seen the emergence of external market factors which are affecting retail banks in particular for now. So, the, the famous and well known digital channel challenger banks or neo banks like revolution starting in 26 are taking off and have already gained millions of customers and then billions in funding between them. And it's an external threat some people would say they're not banks they're more like digital wallets but certainly it's a threat to retail banking in that they own a lot of the front end experience and are gaining ground rapidly. What we're talking about more today is the open banking regulation which is coming out around the world, allowing bank customers to grant access to their account data and payments data to third parties, and that's really interesting. I think these external factors are gaining momentum, and a lot of ideas that were theoretical in the future are now happening to this new open data economy, and that we're moving into a new banking ecosystem and we'll take a look at it. Let's look at open banking first. So, any proponents of this or any evangelists wrote banking would immediately say it will drive innovation so a customer being able to get new products and services based on their existing financial data. I've seen a lot of changes come technology changes and regulation changes over the years I always ask myself the same questions will it really lead to real change. Is it going to impact and the questions I tend to ask are, is it really going to be available on a global scale. Are there use cases that make sense to me and to you, and are there big benefits. They say show me the money. If you can see that there's benefits and money to be made that often drives. It's a marketplace driven innovation. So, let's look at the availability first. We don't understand all of this map but I guess the darker the color the more in place regulations are. And if we look at say the UK and Europe since 2018. The legislation has finished the open bankings in place and there's already a vibrant ecosystem of fintechs new fintechs which are offering services based on account data and payments data that has rolled on through to India and Australia. Other countries are developing the regulation or considering it. I think North America is very interesting in that it may take time for regulation full regulation to come into play for open banking because of the fragmented nature of the banking system. However, you can see in real time that some of the more progressive banks are already starting to open up their APIs and look for partners to share with because they can see which way the marketplace is going. You can see other apps for personal financing and budgeting like wine have or mint they're actually using screenscape scraping in some cases, which is an interesting way of doing things they're getting financial data with consent but it leaves the banks responsible for the data but they're not necessarily controlled in all of the data analysis. So, I feel that in the US it's actually market demand is starting to move ahead of regulation or won't wait for regulation will start to actually drive out some use cases there. Overall, answering the first question. Very much looks to me like the, the inexorable drive of democracy over tyranny it's like open data, over closed data, you can see that with the movement that's already going on, and the unlikely case of ever reversing it that this will come into play sooner or later in your region, wherever you are, if it's not already there. And around use cases, there are many. Let's take a look at a very simple one to start with. Right now, insurance providers in order to assess somebody's financial risk profile and provide the appropriate risk cover and premiums requires a tortuous manual to and fro to get all of that information from various institutions and compile it and work it out. So, even this relatively boring use case you can see how account information can be aggregated to open an open banking API immediately for that customers bank accounts wherever they may be in whatever bank brought together, collated and analyzed. So there are already third party providers offering this service. This is more automation than innovation, but you can see that it immediately provides a far far quicker and easier way to compile a good risk profile, which is a benefit insurance providers and customers. That's just one use case for insurance using account aggregation on open banking APIs. Also of interest, and this is one that we'd all could identify with going to your local retailer supermarket Starbucks or Macy's or whatever, and using your card actually triggers a chain of engagement from various third parties to get that payment completed. And when you look at this kind of a chain. It seems to comply with a lot of the characteristics that would make it open for disruption versus that they, they're only two real parties involved in the value exchange. And yet there are so many other parties involved to get the transaction completed, which seems to be not very logical or useful. The second thing is that all of these parties for payment gateways and processors and card networks are taking a fee that sometimes quite a sizable fee. And this is not necessarily adding tangible benefit to the value transfer but it's certainly costing both the customer and the merchant and money. And then the last thing I'd see here is that there's actually quite often trust depending on the nature of your relationship with the merchant it could be someone that you trust or a merchant or a supermarket that you visit very often. There's some brand loyalty and brand trust there. And in that case, you would see that it this is ripe for disruption. And if you look at the open payments initiative that allows right now retailers who were in those areas with with open payments and open banking already regulated to set up a relationship with the customer whereby they can withdraw the money for the transaction directly from their bank account. So customers again just pick it from a point of sale option or from an app and give biometric authentication and the transaction is completed. It gives immediate value to the retailer. It cuts out a lot of the middleman and the fees. And therefore it that extra value can be used to increase margin for retailers to reduce costs costs or to even reduce the price of the transaction for the customer. So it's a win-win for the two people at the core of the transaction. And it's I'm sure only a matter of time before this really starts to become more widely spread as a use case. I've started to look recently at press releases from Mastercard where they're starting to, I think, get this about the market and making sure that they're launching open APIs themselves to get into that ecosystem rather than be left out of it. And acquiring FinTechs to again be part of that new ecosystem. And I think the banks should probably take up a sit up and take note of this kind of activity because action speed but louder than words. This is a value chain that's ripe for disruption and open payments make that makes that very possible right now. And stepping back, what actually gives a lot of the these new innovative products and services fuel is the fact that it's not just that you can technically access this data is that the other third party providers can do something. And they can bring an extra dimension to the service by combining financial data. So looking at the one we just saw at C3 on this diagram, the retailer has actually started to build up financial services relationship with that customer that they didn't have. And you could imagine that that could extend when the trust is there and the channels are set up to point of sale ending where the retailer can actually lend the customer the money to buy the item and payback over time, which is really interesting. If we look at V1 on this, it's a very simple account aggregation use case. But interestingly for retail banks over many years, the single customer view has been the kind of a holy grail to even get one single customer view of their own customers for the accounts in their own bank, which tend to be siloed. What this would do here is they will allow a third party to aggregate all the account information from any bank for that customer that business and then provide more analysis and more value around that data. So it would kind of almost leapfrog over what banks have been trying to do over the last few years. So to be interesting, you start to get into C1 at the mega app. I think this is one is, it becomes more interesting as I go along in this presentation, the idea that an Amazon or a WeChat, which has huge information about its own clients could become one of the third party users and combine financial data along with all the personal purchasing and preference data that they already have. And that would make them very, very powerful and actually possibly push banks right to the back of the stage in this case. So there's a lot of use cases. I think if we look back there, we can see over the last few slides, there will definitely be global availability of this. It's already rolling out. There are some interesting use cases to say the least, and possibly as these emerge over the next year or two, some very compelling use cases for other third parties to start building innovative new products and services around open banking around unbundled banking, I guess you call the digital banking and around open payments. So what's the bank's perspective on this because it is quite an existential threat, I guess. And I've worked in Bank IT for a number of years, and I know that it's a bit of a cliche to push on the poor banks that they do struggle to roll out new services and features like most larger enterprises are older enterprises. And I know that a lot of banks are trying to move ahead with digital transformation and doing well, normally starting at the back end first I guess, but there is still quite a big shift to turn around the many cases. And I think that banks that are still struggling with modernizing and moving slowly towards a new, a more agile digital model will definitely struggle when API banking and open banking rolls out over the next couple of years. And these are the things that they need to consider. So placing, in terms of modernizing a lot of banks realize that they have a lot of technical debt and outdated legacy back end systems, but rather than take the risk of replacing them all a core strategy for many banks is to place an application programming interface as an abstraction layer. And that would be the private APIs, a lot of banks are doing this just to get out their own data in a more efficient way. Public APIs would be around the open banking so the it's a version of this API which is available to the public and is enforced by compliance to be there. I've spoken some colleagues who are still in banking it and they said that it's taken them so long to get their own API is working and then to comply with open banking that they haven't really thought any further than this. And I would say to them, this is really important right now, opening up partner APIs on the gets is a chance for banks to get on the front foot and start getting out to find partners in the new more open ecosystem. If they don't do that somebody else well and somebody else will use the open banking APIs to do that. And banks are still slow and saying look let's see what the market is going to bring us over the next years before we decide. I would ask this question, which seems an unusual question but it's around mobile telcos. And then we can see from Financial Times articles of last why that they had been retrenching reducing rationalizing and cutting costs. And you can see the reason quite clearly now looking back at mobile telcos while they've generated billions during the 90s and early 2000s. I've actually lost the front end to the over the top players like Amazon and Netflix and Google and Apple and Facebook obviously. And a lot of the margin and the value and the experience is happening there in their front end but on their network with the cash is going to the over the top players. I can't say how is that relevant. Well, if you look at that it's a highly regulated industry where the industry has spent years building up the strong infrastructure to support services, but didn't quickly enough get out into the front end experience, let other players get in there, who are now taking the core relationships in the margin and leading to, I guess, telecom operators becoming back end wholesale. These are relevant providers in their own industry. And you do have to wonder if that could happen in retail banking and happen very quickly. If we look at some very recent research from Accenture, when talking to I guess what they call digitally active or digital nomads is a huge majority 78% of those who would be quite happy to take banking services from the likes of Google or Amazon. They would be happy to share their Google Amazon data with banks but they would expect a lot more in return from banks and more personalized services. This has always been mentioned and for a long time people have said look Google doesn't want to be an insurance company doesn't want to be a bank, but we now see coming from the Wall Street Journal and other places. And speaking out in words with Google announcing that they will provide checking accounts with Apple introducing credit cards, Amazon talking about checking accounts as well. So, this whole theoretical possible future threat is now here. And when you combine that with the likes, the types of regulation around open banking and the expectation around open data in general. I think these changes are going to rapidly accelerate over the next while. So, retail banks in particular need to sit up and take notice of this. The question we often ask around open source and where that fits in here. Particularly in conferences like this in the open source strategy forum we spend a lot of time looking at lighthouse projects where banks have used some open source in some projects and how it is good enough. And the question is, is it good enough for banking. And I think that's the wrong question. I think that banks are asking very internal base question from their side of the world saying, is this kind of technology good enough. And based on everything that's happening rapidly out in the market, the changes and the ownership of data changing hands. The question that should be asked, much more importantly should be a market based question, where is the market going for banks they should maybe ask themselves do we have the technical talent. Do we have the speed and agility to compete in what the open data marketplace is going to look like. And it's not five years from now it's like 24 months from now. And that's where open source probably comes into this equation more. And this is again it's from Accenture is a great illustration of what can happen. We look often at the open data marketplace where life events and life moments are spotted on social networks they're true searches they could be anywhere in the digital world, recognizing those moments, and working with third party ecosystem participants so that would be a bank who has an open API partnership with insurance, or with car finance or with any other those services that match what's happening with the person out in their digital life, and they're able to be there and be present and offer that combined service in a way that's personalized relevant and timely. And that would be the living bank and that it's far and away from where a lot of banks are now still struggling with getting basic API is a place. Other banks are well ahead. A lot of banks are thinking well and maybe starting up their own digital challenges to themselves, but not doing this I believe would be a major misstep. I think it will be really interesting and we'll get banks back out in front, unlike the telecom operators. Again, looking at open source. We see the relevance for this it's looking at bank challenges and looking at where open source fits so for banks the ecosystem is growing now it's not growing next year the year after so third party providers are already using banking data to provide services digital challenger banks we're going to take some of this on interesting in Ireland, KBC, which would be the third or fourth bank one of the first things they did on their app was to offer. If you had a bank balance with one of the bigger banks, one of the established large legacy banks they offered to show that balance on their own app, knowing that they maybe only had some of your business, but could now offer you an app, which is more personalized to you and you would start looking at your bank of Ireland balance through your KBC app. That's really interesting. And that's only within the banking sphere. Imagine what third party providers could do with that. The other interesting point here for banks is that, while it now looks like data is open, and there's an open competition for financial services. It's actually not that clear cut and what actually is happening is that open banking forces banks to provide account and payments data to the rest of the world, but there is no reciprocal so Google and Amazon or Facebook can now get at account data for customers. But that does not mean that they have to provide any of their really important personalized data to the banks. So open banking actually puts banks at a retail banks at a disadvantage. So it's not an even competition. Oh, and I think this is true. And so many spheres has been a shift to the front end so a bank account is a bank account running in the back end it doesn't feel any different necessarily whatever system it's running on. But what has been proven time and again it's proven even by the digital challenger banks is that if the front end experience is personalized if it's slick. It's interesting and offering innovative products. That's where the new battlefield is, and it's not necessarily a strength of banks banks tend to lag five or 10 years behind and their front end apps, even if they're launching new apps they tend to be siloed and not giving a full customer view, or as I say a little bit behind. There's a new growing ecosystem which is very much enabled by new technology there's a need for banks to have the best technical talent. And this is where open source fully fits the frame. The open source community is quite equivalent to the ecosystem that's growing now, and speaks the language of fintech so open banking APIs themselves are open source, and a huge amount of the products and services that are developed around open source, which is not just the technology but also the culture, the collaborative nature and sharing of that and it's much much easier to do that. Working with new fintechs if you're working with open source tools and processes and coming from a proprietary back end or closed off system. And open source let's not forget dominates the front end so react and react native are the most popular frameworks or approaches for front end along with things like angular and view and engineers almost automatically will choose the open source tools that they can use. So if you want to work and lead in this ecosystem which is technologically driven front end focused and open and collaborative and moving very rapidly then open source is necessary. Not so much around the back end proprietary systems of the bank but definitely around the future front ends. We want to collaborate and that's why a lot of these open source systems attract great engineers and architects who want to collaborate learn iterate true and talk to other engineers which is essentially what open source facilitates. For example, I mentioned Polaris earlier on that's our approach to the front end so we use in near form a react and react native core and things like graph ql in the background but we use that to create fully working great looking apps on Android iOS web using a single code base to react. We recently partnered with IBM to develop an open banking reference app, fully working against open banking accounts and using financial transfers. We're just using react and have the whole thing up and working in four weeks. That's the same framework reviews for covert tracing up so it shows again that the open source tools in the right hands, using the right way can create really exciting front end experiences using open banking in and very very rapidly and securely. So again, this is even wider it's not really just about open banking it's about open data and that is growing and growing. So the real winners here will be the ones who understand that financial data can be combined with all sorts of other open accounts to APIs. And that's where the next ecosystem is. If you look at say Amazon's dominance of the American market with 80% of households having an Amazon Prime. It's just showing that the super app based on getting your data understanding is where the world is going and banks I think have a couple of steps to catch up retail banks in getting more open source and more open data and more open approach to this very quickly. Finally, I guess to comfort circle. I think that that result is, if you look at unbundled banking and digital challenging banking coming in the last five years and hugely taken the world by storm. Open banking is has gone even faster. I believe that the next move to financial data being open and used in whatever front end is the most personal and the most familiar to you is what what the open data economies about. So we've moved beyond I think even in the last few months would move beyond API banking and multi banking and we're now in an open data economy. And that's where open banking open source and I guess an open mind is going to show us who the next winners are. And thank you very much for your time.