Open banking: Fueling innovation on an open source core banking platform

Banks are now just starting to embrace open source. Ed Cable and James Dailey share case studies on banks and fintech startups from four different continents that built on top of the Apache Fineract core banking platform, accelerating their innovation, lowering their costs, and transforming them from consumers to contributors of open source.

While the banking industry is finally just waking up to open source software, for the past 16 years, the Mifos project has staked out a position of 100% open source for a full banking application. Committed to developing a platform that supports the unbanked around the world, the Mifos Initiative contributed its Mifos X platform to the Apache Software Foundation as Apache Fineract in 2016. Although the company started in the underserved market of microfinance banks and microcredit programs, it has seen a recent uptake by major payment companies and larger banks. Ed Cable and James Dailey share case studies on banks and fintech startups from four different continents that built on top of the Apache Fineract core banking platform, accelerating their innovation, lowering their costs, and transforming them from consumers to contributors of open source. For each case study, Ed and James highlight the sales cycle in getting senior management at enterprise financial institutions to explore and embrace open source, the impact to the bottom line and culture of the organization, and the challenge in convincing leadership to become members of the open source community. Along the way, they detail lessons learned in pitching open source to banking and payment corporations, the widespread effects of adopting it, and transforming banks from consumers to contributors. Case studies include: