Open Source in Finance Forum London 2026

Open source is essential to modern enterprise software, yet contributing to it from within large organizations remains complex. Enterprises must balance developer productivity with strict requirements around security, governance, and license compliance. Many Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) still rely on fragmented tools and manual processes that slow down development and introduce operational risk.

This talk introduces Git-proxy, an architectural approach that acts as a secure gateway between enterprise developers and the open-source ecosystem. By embedding governance, security checks, and license compliance directly into contribution workflows, Git-proxy enables organizations to scale open-source collaboration while maintaining enterprise-grade controls.

Attendees will learn how automation, standardized workflows, and policy-driven development can simplify open-source contribution management and significantly improve developer experience.

Financial institutions operate under intense pressure to modernise their engineering practices while maintaining robust governance, security, and regulatory compliance. As technology estates grow and teams become more distributed, organisations face recurring challenges: duplicated effort, slow delivery, inconsistent standards, difficulty sharing knowledge, and fragmented developer experience. InnerSource – applying open source principles inside the enterprise - offers a powerful way to address these issues. But adoption is often uneven, misunderstood, or difficult to scale without clear structures and tangible evidence of value.

This joint session from NatWest and Citi presents practical guidance for how financial institutions can successfully adopt and scale InnerSource in a regulated environment. We combine real case studies, OSPO-led enablement approaches, patterns derived from the InnerSource Commons, and a value metrics framework that quantifies InnerSource’s impact across teams and platforms.

Participants will walk away with practical frameworks, proven patterns, and next steps for joining and contributing to the InnerSource SIG.

Open source software underpins nearly every modern engineering platform in financial services, yet only a small number of these technologies are truly essential to day‑to‑day delivery. As organisations scale, the challenge shifts from adoption to sustainability: keeping critical open source tools secure, current, well‑understood, and fit for purpose over time.

This talk explores how large financial institutions can move beyond traditional ownership models and build internal communities of practice around core open source technologies. Drawing on real‑world experience, it examines why centralised ownership does not scale, how community‑driven stewardship reduces operational risk, and how aligned internal communities improve consistency and engineering velocity.

Attendees will learn how to identify essential open source technologies, what healthy internal communities look like in practice, and how to sustain them long term. The session also covers common anti‑patterns, governance considerations in regulated environments, and the role of an Open Source Program Office (OSPO) in enabling — rather than owning — these communities.

The Linux Foundation, FINOS, and others in the open source community have already created strategies and patterns that are enabling regulated enterprises to manage the increased open source and software supply chain scrutiny of regulators and auditors.

Strategies and patterns that enable an open discovery and transparency of shared risks across the core ecosystem, and the ability to leverage regulations to drive positive change, can also be applied to quantum-readiness journeys.

This presentation will explore several of these strategies and patterns and walk-through how to leverage them to either start, or speed-up the journey of quantum safety in a regulated company.

With customers demanding seamless digital experiences, and regulators requiring consistent transparency around operational excellence, many institutions are turning to cloud technology to meet these needs. Cloud has already transformed traditional models, leading to new levels of reliability and flexibility. We’ll look at the growing expectations for ‘always-on’ access to online services and data, what this means for the platforms this depends on, and the strategies needed to ensure resiliency.

The FINOS Distinguished Engineer (DE) Special Interest Group is a growing community with a clear mission: to develop and provide senior engineering leadership for socially impactful work and to support FINOS projects with experienced talent. Now progressing toward promotion into the main FINOS GitHub organisation, the DE SIG is shaping how Distinguished Engineers collaborate, learn and lead across financial services.

This panel brings together contributors who have been central to its early development. Peter Suggitt (NatWest Group) brings deep experience in engineering and transformation; Li Qun Taylor (NatWest Group) shares senior leadership insights on career progression and building inclusive pathways in technology; Anthony Kesterton (Red Hat) brings strategic expertise in complex enterprise‑scale challenges; Peter Thomas (Deutsche Bank) shares reflections on the DE SIG’s origins, early progress and how this relates to Distinguished Engineering at Deutsche Bank; and Mark Brotherwood (Davies), DE SIG founder, shares the vision behind its growth. le challenges; and Mark Brotherwood (Davies), DE SIG founder, shares the vision behind its growth. 

Hosted by Pooi Ling Cheong (NatWest Open-Source Program Office), the session will explore how the DE SIG fosters an open, supportive environment for senior engineers and aspiring DEs, broadens representation and contributes to socially impactful work. Attendees will gain practical ways to engage, grow and help shape this emerging community of senior engineering leads.