Towards Collaboration in the Banking Industry
Eclipse Banking Day, by the way the first event which brought the Eclipse Community together with one specific industry, was a huge success with around 60 people! All presentations are on the agenda page of the EBD website, a small photo gallery is on flickr.
A special “thank you”? goes to Ralph Müller and the Eclipse Foundation who basically made the Eclipse Banking Day possible.
Eclipse Banking Day has shown a lot of interesting areas for collaboration between banks. Mike Milinkovich (Eclipse Foundation) predicted “In 3 years Banks are collaborating on a common platform to improve their IT agility and reduce cost”? (Mikes presentation is here). There have been already promising signals by some banks at the Banking Bof at Eclipse Con ‘08 that they have Eclipse based software for which they consider open collaboration. At Eclipse Banking Day more potential starting-points for collaboration appeared: Mr. Oppliger (Schweizer PostFinance) has presented a GUI framework which contains a lot of very promising features which are not specific to one bank (here is Mr. Oppligers presentation). Mr. Reichenbach and Dr. Gille presented an order management system which is used at Degussa Bank and contained several reusable basic components (Mr. Reichenbachs presentation is here). Other representatives from banks showed concrete interest in open protocol implementations like FIX or SWIFT, bank-specific tools and some funcional modules. One interesting example for a functional module is the valuation of assets inside a fund for financial statements. This example explains where collaboration makes sense for banks:
- Competition neutrality: It does not allow competitive advantages or disadvantages
- Process similarity: The process should be quite similar in several banks
There are several other factors which impact the potential to collaborate, but these two seem to be most important. Our relatively young Eclipse project Open Financial Markets Platform offers these attempts for collaboration a technical home with all the benefits of an Eclipse project, e.g. a solid management of intellectual properties.
Collaboration between banks might start on the level of specific projects. But with increasing collaboration a central body to collect requirements and help steering technical roadmaps will be useful. This will bring interested parties together to foster collaboration and will avoid wasting time and money for double work. The Banking Industry Working Group which is being created by the Eclipse Foundation seems perfect for that.
In the meantime Ralph Müller and I are collecting proposals for collaborative development and bring interested parties together.
