FINOS Launches AI Readiness as the Cornerstone Effort of an Industry-Wide Open-Source AI Initiative for Financial Services

The Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), the financial services umbrella of the Linux Foundation, today announced the formation of the AI Readiness for Financial Services Industry (FSI) Special Interest Group (SIG) as part of its broader pioneering artificial intelligence (AI) strategic initiative.

This SIG will create a collaborative environment for industry leaders to collectively develop frameworks and policies designed to enable the effective, safe, trustworthy and compliant deployment of generative AI technologies. The aim is to replicate the major impact the FINOS Open Source Readiness Program made in open source adoption in the industry.

An impressive roster of FINOS members have signed on to advance this initiative including Citi, Scott Logic, Morgan Stanley, and ControlPlane leading the effort; Databricks as an Executive Sponsor; Gold FINOS Members: the London Stock Exchange Group and Publicis Sapient; and Silver Member: EPAM – showcasing the industry’s strong commitment to this transformative journey. Additionally, Microsoft and Provectus, as new FINOS members are also participating in this effort.

The recent advances in AI – and more specifically generative AI – are poised to have a disruptive impact on the financial services industry and the customers it serves. Very few technologies in the past have had such broad “reach” and offered so many potential opportunities so quickly.

So while there is a strong industry-wide desire to onboard, trial, experiment and release products using this technology, there are unique challenges that must be addressed upfront. For example, many financial services organisations have mature processes for on-boarding technology which may not be well-suited to the particulars of generative AI technology.

As the industry faces this shared challenge, the FINOS open source community believes there is considerable potential for mutualization to support the prudent use of generative AI for both the customer and financial services organisations while ultimately allowing for its effective deployment and rapid adoption.

“The advances in generative AI offer promising opportunities to better serve our customers. Establishing a robust and transparent governance framework that can keep pace with this rapidly developing technology will help enable financial services organisations to leverage it – open-source collaboration is the best way to deliver that.” – Ian Micallef, Head of Developer Enablement at Citi.

FSI AI Readiness Special Interest Group (SIG)

In reflection of this critical business need, the FINOS Governing Board approved an AI strategic initiative, the FSIs AI Readiness Special Interest Group (SIG). Its key focus is to guide the safe deployment and consumption of generative AI through open collaboration and innovation. Specifically, the SIG will develop a governance framework for the onboarding, development and running of AI-based solutions within financial services organisations. It will pay special attention to regulation and compliance while prioritising trustworthiness, transparency, safety, privacy and the mitigation of bias.

This SIG kicked off in March, co-chaired by Ian Micallef, Head of Developer Enablement at Citi and Colin Eberhardt, CTO of Scott Logic; alongside core team members Madhu Coimbatore, Executive Director, AI Platform Development at Morgan Stanley and Andrew Martin, CEO of ControlPlane; and with backing from Executive Sponsor, Databricks.

“The potential of generative AI seems to be ever increasing, with technological advances and new use cases emerging almost daily. However, to unlock this potential, we need to find a way to onboard this technology in a safe and controlled fashion. I’m very excited by the prospect of creating a shared governance framework that tackles these challenges, delivering benefits to all within the financial services community”, said Colin Eberhardt, CTO of Scott Logic and Co-Chair of the AI Readiness SIG.

The AI Readiness for FSIs SIG will provide a collaborative space for discussing common challenges and producing essential governance frameworks, regulatory engagement models, as well as education and training for engineering leads and developers.

In its formation stage, the SIG is open to FINOS members only, who can signal their interest by reaching out to membersuccess@finos.org. It will open to the broader community later in 2024. Financial institutions, tech leaders and the wider FSI community, who wish to participate in shaping the initiative, are invited to join FINOS today.

Further Open Source Generative AI exploration

As part of the broader AI initiative, the SIG is expected to be just the first effort to emerge from exploratory conversations held across the FINOS membership, academia and innovators in the space. This community is actively nurturing contributions to advance the creation of openly governed tools, datasets and language models to accelerate financial services generative AI innovation.

“The pendulum is shifting from closed, proprietary models to open source models because they enable organisations to build smart, efficient systems on their own IP, control the underlying data, and ensure it’s properly governed,” said Junta Nakai, Global VP, Financial Services at Databricks. “Databricks has long been a champion of open source, and now we’re helping our financial services customers build open source models that understand their context and domain. That’s why we’re thrilled to be a strategic co-sponsor of the FINOS AI initiative, as we know open source will continue to play an essential role in the ever-evolving generative AI landscape.”

“Open source is quickly eating generative AI like every other area of technology, but the community is grappling with what it even means to be open source in the context of generative AI,” said Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director of FINOS and General Manager of Linux Foundation Europe. “As a trusted host of financial services grade open projects, we see an opportunity for the industry to collaborate in the open on precompetitive financial services domain-specific language models. Importantly, we also have a responsibility to be a steward of truly open source efforts financial services can rely on”.

“Generative AI is transforming the industry with natural language interfaces that can create and use new knowledge from data. Microsoft is committed to ensuring our AI systems are fair, reliable, safe, secure, private, inclusive, and transparent.  The AI Readiness SIG will give us an opportunity to share open source frameworks and have early conversations with the regulators to ensure responsible outcomes as financial services adopt this key innovation” says Allison Nachtigal, VP Industry Cloud at Microsoft.

Interested parties are encouraged to join the Open Financial LLM Mailing list by emailing open-financial-llm+subscribe@lists.finos.org and join workshops and forums focused on the future of AI in financial services at the upcoming Open Source in Finance Forum (OSFF), in London (June 26th, 2024) and New York (September 30th & October 1st, 2024).

FINOS extends an invitation to all financial services institutions, regulators, AI innovators, product companies, hyperscalers, and other stakeholders to join this transformative initiative and lead a future for AI in financial services that prioritises the highest standards of trust, safety, and transparency.