FINOS Members including Citi, Scott Logic, Morgan Stanley,
ControlPlane, Microsoft, London Stock Exchange Group, Publicis
Sapient, Databricks, EPAM and Provectus collaborate to develop a
governance framework for the onboarding, development and running of
AI-based solutions within 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 organizations 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 organizations 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
organizations 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
organizations. It will pay special attention to regulation and
compliance while prioritizing 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 organizations 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
prioritizes the highest standards of trust, safety, and
transparency.
For more information about FINOS, its strategic initiatives, and
how to get involved, please visit FINOS.org. To learn more about
joining FINOS as a member, visit the Member Benefits page.
About FINOS
FINOS (The Fintech Open Source Foundation) is a nonprofit whose
mission is to foster the adoption of open source, open standards
and collaborative software development practices in financial
services. It is the center for open source developers and the
financial services industry to build new technology projects that
have a lasting impact on business operations. As a regulatory
compliant platform, the foundation enables developers from these
competing organizations to collaborate on projects with a strong
propensity for mutualization. It has enabled codebase contributions
from both the buy- and sell-side firms and counts over 50 major
financial institutions, fintechs and technology consultancies as
part of its membership. FINOS is also part of the Linux Foundation,
the largest shared technology organization in the world. Get
involved and join FINOS as a Member. To stay up to date on FINOS
news, events, podcasts, blogs, and more, sign up here.
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version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240430210716/en/
Grizz Griswold, Head of Marketing FINOS grizz@finos.org