Alloy Platform, together with PURE modeling language, to be open-sourced into FINOS to improve data exchange within financial services industry
NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / November 20, 2019 / FINOS (the Fintech Open Source Foundation), a nonprofit whose mission is to foster adoption of open source, open standards, and collaborative software development practices in financial services, today announced that its Platinum member Goldman Sachs is making a major open source contribution to the foundation a logical modeling language, internally named "PURE", along with a platform and visual model tool that generates PURE-based models, known within Goldman as "Alloy". Today's announcement was made at FINOS' annual Open Source Strategy Forum ("OSSF") event in New York.
"Open source technology is setting us on a path to greater collaboration and building mutual understanding," said Neema Raphael, co-chief data officer at Goldman Sachs. "PURE and Alloy have grown to become critical tools within our firm across the trade lifecycle that help us price; assess and evaluate risk; clear transactions; and perform regulatory reporting. We've only scratched the surface though -- we'll unlock tremendous value for the industry when we co-develop and share models."
"The open-sourcing of Alloy, together with PURE, will have far-reaching impact on the banking industry, " said Gabriele Columbro, executive director, FINOS. "Using Alloy, industry participants will be able to collaboratively build shared data models in a common language."
Commonly developed models using PURE are expected to reduce system integration costs in bi-lateral and multilateral trading scenarios, for both sell-side and buy-side firms. Such models are also expected to lower compliance burden and complexity for both banks and regulatory agencies themselves. "Open source ‘compliance-as-code' has the potential to change fundamentally how banks and regulators work together," continued Columbro.
The open-sourcing of Alloy and PURE will occur in three iterative phases. In the first phase, already begun, a new external version of Alloy is being deployed using GitLab for modeling source control. In the second phase, to begin in January, other banks and financial services organizations will be invited to use this new external Alloy instance to pilot collaborative financial model development in PURE.
"Given the size of this contribution, we felt it was important to approach its open-sourcing iteratively," said Rob Underwood, director of programs at FINOS. "The pilot will give us a chance to collect feedback on how Alloy and PURE work best when used across institutional boundaries, allowing us to prepare for greater industry adoption as the code is open-sourced."
Following the pilot, the underlying Alloy and PURE code itself will be made publicly available in a FINOS GitLab repository under an Apache 2.0 open source license. This final phase is expected to be completed in mid-2020.
Fellow financial services firms and industry leaders were quick to praise this development as a potential high value industry wide collaboration:
"The contribution of PURE/Alloy by Goldman Sachs into FINOS is a fantastic development that demonstrates further momentum of the open source movement in financial services and the strong industry support for our foundation's mission to expand open source adoption," said Alejandra Villagra, FINOS board chair, and global head of Citi Velocity at Citi. "PURE/Alloy is another example of how open source initiatives are well suited to address real business use cases in our industry."
"The PURE/Alloy platform could help address a pressing industry challenge: defining models, rules, and semantics for many parties to receive and share data," added Dov Katz, FINOS vice chair, distinguished engineer and managing director at Morgan Stanley. "This project complements existing FINOS community efforts such as the Financial Objects program, the Security Reference Data project, and the foundation's desktop interoperability initiatives."
"This contribution is an example of the power of open source collaboration as it brings innovation to industries that are just beginning to realize their enormous potential," said Sid Sijbrandij, CEO at GitLab. "This new infrastructure will help enhance the industry's ability to solve common problems and create new ways of conducting business."
"The collaborative power of open source software is huge and as an active FINOS member I'm pleased by the introduction of Alloy and PURE, and am looking forward to better evaluating their capabilities. Modelling can be fragmented and inconsistent, especially across asset classes - Alloy and PURE offer the potential to build common data models and, along with other FINOS initiatives and open source technologies such as Plexus, could help to address many of the industry's interoperability and interchange use cases," said Russell Green, head of group architecture, Deutsche Bank, and FINOS board member.
To learn more about the Alloy Modeling Platform, or to inquire about getting involved in the pilot starting in January, please visit www.finos.org/pure-alloy. To find out about how to contribute to FINOS and participate in the FINOS open source community more generally, please visit www.finos.org/get-involved.
About FINOS
The Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS) is an independent membership organization whose purpose is to accelerate collaboration and innovation in financial services through the adoption of open source software, standards and best practices. FINOS believes that global financial organizations that embrace open source software, together with common standards, will be best positioned to capture the growth opportunities presented by a quickly evolving technological landscape. FINOS has 10 programs driven by more than 30 financial services and technology members, 300+ community contributors and over 75 open source repositories. We enable collaboration in key areas of innovation for the industry including data, cloud, interoperability, and decentralized technologies. FINOS is a 501(c)(6) and is based in Burlingame, CA with an office in New York, NY. For more information, visit www.finos.org.
About The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.
The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. is a leading global investment banking, securities and investment management firm that provides a wide range of financial services to a substantial and diversified client base that includes corporations, financial institutions, governments and individuals. Founded in 1869, the firm is headquartered in New York and maintains offices in all major financial centers around the world.
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SOURCE: FINOS