Open source in Banking – Building the bank of the future, today

Banking is at a pivotal moment.

New regulations like virtual banking licensing frameworks, advances in open banking and big techs rapidly gaining ground in financial services, are dramatically changing the banking landscape, forcing incumbents to reinvent themselves. To be successful, the bank of the future will need to embrace emerging technologies, focus on providing exceptional customer experiences and take a more holistic approach to ‘change’.

Banks will have to create a technology foundation that enables them to quickly bounce back from future contingencies and open source has a crucial role to play in building the bank of the future, today.

Banking digital transformation and the role of open source

Banks have shown an astonishing ability to adapt to change and to play a leading role in sustaining the economy in the face of monumental challenges posed by COVID-19 pandemic.

But transformation amid such difficult conditions is not easy. A financial institution’s  long-term success and competitiveness will be largely determined by its ability to be more agile, responsive, and scalable than its competitors.  The winners will be those that successfully adopt platform and ecosystem models, and actively collaborate with other organizations to leverage open source for faster innovation and deliver next-gen banking.

Open source allows banks to build the right products that their customers need in today’s fast-paced, ever changing digital world. The use of open source software ensures that banks’ offering is ever evolving and improving, and reflects what their customers really need. Open source also has a key role in enabling financial institutions to reduce their IT budget spend on software licensing and services.

On the path of digital transformation, banks need frictionless cloud computing. They will need to leverage the right mix of cloud services – a hybrid multi-cloud that provides consistent experience and unified management across multiple public clouds, private clouds, and traditional infrastructure.

In search for frictionless cloud computing

Although public cloud adoption within the banking sector is growing steadily, it is slower than other sectors. Information security requirements, risk and compliance, ecosystem management, integration, and control preferences are exceedingly high within the financial services sector requiring banks to sustain existing private data center infrastructure and to build new private clouds.

Open hybrid cloud

An emerging cloud computing trend is Open hybrid cloud that is built on an open-source platform, enabling the flexibility, portability, interoperability, and control you need to consistently deploy and jointly manage cloud applications and workloads.

Open hybrid cloud will allow banks to manage not only their current public and private clouds, but those they may add in the future. Open hybrid cloud will enable scaling and app deployment across public and private clouds for greater consistency and efficiency.

Cloud agnostic services developed with open, common standards can push the standard of cloud proficiency and allow financial institutions greater control over their enterprise cloud solutions. Reusing software stacks, libraries and components will also create more common ground between applications for interoperability.

OpenStack

A key component of Open Hybrid Cloud is a private cloud built with open source technologies. OpenStack is the most popular open source private cloud platform that provides a complete ecosystem for building private clouds. Built from multiple sub-projects as a modular system, OpenStack allows enterprises to build out a scalable private (or hybrid) cloud architecture that is based on open standards.

OpenStack enables application portability among private and public clouds, allowing financial institutions to choose the best cloud for their applications and workflows at any time, without lock-in. It can also be integrated with a variety of key business systems such as Active Directory and LDAP.

The biggest challenge of OpenStack is everyday operations automation, year after year, while OpenStack continues to evolve rapidly.

Charmed OpenStack

Canonical solves this problem with automation that decouples architectural choices from the operations code base that supports upgrades, scaling, integration and bare metal provisioning. From bare metal to cloud control plane, Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack uses automation and leverages model-driven operations.

Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack is an enterprise grade OpenStack distribution that ensures private cloud best price-performance, providing full automation around OpenStack deployments and operations. Together with Ubuntu, it meets the highest security, stability and quality standards in the industry.

Get in touch with us to learn how banks globally are using open source technologies including private cloud build using OpenStack on Ubuntu to deliver their digital strategy and to stay at the forefront of innovation.

Photo by Visual Stories || Micheile on Unsplash