Innersource Adoption in Banking | Generated by AI
Question: What are some examples of inner sourcing (innersource) practices or adoption in banks and financial institutions?
Answer:
Inner sourcing (also called innersource) involves applying open-source development principles—such as collaborative contributions, transparency, code sharing, and community-driven improvements—internally within an organization to break down silos, improve code reuse, and accelerate innovation.
Several banks and financial institutions have adopted innersource practices, particularly to modernize software development in regulated environments:
-
Capital One: One of the pioneers in innersource among banks. They have an active InnerSource community, use models like “Managed Contribution and Moderation,” and apply innersource to enterprise applications, credit card decisioning platforms, and CI/CD pipelines (e.g., building a singular software delivery pipeline with GitHub for company-wide transparency and contributions).
-
Lloyds Banking Group: Collaborates with Red Hat to accelerate innersource adoption, focusing on standardizing contributor roles, streamlining processes, and improving efficiency and product quality across the group.
-
US Bank: Has embraced innersource to shift from siloed development to greater cross-team collaboration, viewing it as a cultural change from “swimming in your lane.”
-
Discover Financial Services: Used an innersource model for their “Trident” CI/CD pipeline, encouraging broad engineering contributions to improve the tool and increase adoption company-wide.
-
Bloomberg (a major financial services and data company): Inner source has become the norm over the past decade, starting from developer tools and expanding to cross-asset trading applications.
Additionally, organizations like the FINOS (Fintech Open Source Foundation) have an InnerSource Special Interest Group (SIG) dedicated to advancing innersource in financial services, sharing best practices, patterns, and maturity models among member institutions.
These examples show innersource gaining traction in banking to foster collaboration while maintaining compliance and security.
References:
- https://www.capitalone.com/tech/open-source/innersourcing-enterprise-applications/
- https://www.capitalone.com/tech/open-source/innersource-singular-software-delivery-pipeline/
- https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/44113/lloyds-collaborates-with-red-hat-on-innersource-engineering-programme
- https://www.infoworld.com/article/2270568/inner-source-in-the-enterprise-gains-momentum.html
- https://www.devopsdigest.com/discover-technology-inner-source
- https://osr.finos.org/docs/innersource/introduction
- https://bitergia.com/blog/innersource/innersource-for-financial-services-a-way-to-improve-digital-transformation/