Linux Foundation projects merge to meet global demand for
climate data and analytics, accelerating financial services ESG
solutions through open source.
LONDON, June 26,
2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, the Linux Foundation
announced the merger of its financial services umbrella,
the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), with
OS-Climate, an open source community dedicated to building data
technologies, modeling, and analytic tools that will drive global
capital flows into climate change mitigation and resilience.
This merger marks a significant step forward in addressing the
persistent challenges stakeholders face in finance, investment,
regulatory compliance, and policy as they work to allocate capital
at the scale and pace required to address the fast-growing climate
crisis.
"As climate change continues to impact every aspect of the
global economy, this merger is a testament to the Linux
Foundation's commitment to sustainability," said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux
Foundation. "FINOS has led the charge in delivering business
value to the financial services industry through open source
collaboration and OS-Climate has been a global leader in climate
finance, and open collaboration on ESG and regulatory compliance.
We're excited for OS-Climate to merge into FINOS for the increased
value they can deliver to our global community."
OS-Climate joins FINOS as a Supplemental Directed Fund (the
OS-Climate SDF) with a dedicated Governing Board, under the broader
oversight of the FINOS Governing Board. It will continue to operate
as OS-Climate.
As part of the merger, OS-Climate projects (Climate Data
Commons, Portfolio Alignment, Risk & Resilience Tools,
Transition Scenario Planning) will continue as FINOS projects.
Current OS-Climate members will join the nearly 100-strong FINOS
corporate member community.
Multiplying the impact on climate and ESG in financial
services and beyond
The union of FINOS and OS-Climate members and communities blends
a powerful cadre of finance, corporate executives and practitioners
with IT executives and developers. It creates a single open source
collaborative effort focused on developing climate and
sustainability solutions that can yield both exceptional business
value and environmental impact.
Goldman Sachs and RedHat, member firms of both FINOS and
OS-Climate support the move.
"Goldman Sachs has maintained a long-standing commitment to
open-source data and its potential to help solve for key
measurement problems in climate, sustainability, and regulatory
tech. As a founding member of both FINOS and OS-Climate,
Goldman has supported their growth and development and looks
forward to a future where open-source data can be used across
climate and other key areas for regulatory data, following the
merger." Kara Succoso Mangone, Head of Goldman Sachs
Sustainable Finance Group.
Richard Harmon, Vice President,
Global Financial Services Industry of Red Hat - a leading provider
of enterprise open source software solutions said,
"Red Hat lives by the belief that innovation and progress
happen faster when we collaborate in open communities towards
shared goals. As a member of both FINOS and OS-Climate, we have
seen the impact they have each made in their own right, in enabling
rapid collective innovation addressing financial services
technology and tackling one of the most pressing global issues. A
pertinent example is the Red Hat-led OS-Climate Data Mesh project,
which has helped to drive the consistency and interoperability
essential for the Net Zero Data Public Utility and other data
utilities that serve capital markets and the public sector. Now as
the two areas increasingly converge with the urgency for businesses
to act to mitigate climate risk and advance sustainable finance, we
see immense opportunity for FINOS and OS-Climate together to power
a new level of participation and outcomes for business and society
that is greater than the sum of their parts."
Global consulting firm BIP Partner, Financial Services and
Sustainable Finance, Johnny
Mattimore adds.
"The merger is a seminal moment for the integration of
sustainable finance into the traditional financial markets. For
many years, we have seen firms struggle with huge costs, severe
complexity and long timescales to try and solve this integration
problem. The wider market has now concluded that collaboration is
the only way to solve this in a timely manner, at scale and at
lower cost. The end game for the global financial system is to
integrate these new data sets into valuation models to ensure that
the system has robust capital adequacy plans for different
potential future outcomes of climate risk. The scope of end-users'
needs is vast: it includes reporting, analysis and controls,
revaluation risk models and, ultimately, transparent risk transfer
via capital market derivatives and parametric insurance. I believe
that open source is the only way that these imperatives can be
met."
Enabling an agile regulatory response
As policymakers seek to drive trillions into low carbon
technologies, adaptation, and resilience, there is a growing
awareness that climate-related risk is being mispriced across every
asset class. It is also clear that regulation will continue to
tighten around the world as dramatic climate impacts increase.
Spearheaded by the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive
(CSRD), global ESG regulatory requirements are only expected to
grow and are acknowledged as a key priority for C-suite executives
in 2024 and beyond.
Combining the ESG regulatory expertise of OS-Climate members
with FINOS' Open RegTech initiative (and potentially with
projects such as Morphir and the CDM) creates an ideal platform for
banks to collaborate on developing a common technology platform for
ESG reporting.
"OS-Climate is trusted as a formal advisor to the Climate
Data Steering Committee and Task for Nature-Related Financial
Disclosures, which influence current and forthcoming climate and
sustainability policies and regulations affecting every Linux
Foundation member, and we collaborate with Glasgow Financial
Alliance for Net Zero developing open source tools available for
its 675 asset owners, asset managers, and banks with over
$130 trillion in banking and
financial assets." said OS-Climate Founder, Truman Semans, "The merger will enable members
of the FINOS technical community to directly connect with these
initiatives through OS-Climate, and these networks will now be able
to access an untapped source of world-class technical expertise
essential for the design of effective policy, regulation, and
voluntary initiatives."
FINOS is the home for open source collaboration in financial
services with thousands of contributors to its 50+ projects.
Supported by close to 100 corporate members across sell-side,
buy-side, technology vendors, cloud services providers, and
non-profit organizations, FINOS operates under the oversight of a
Governing Board currently chaired by Citi and Wellington
Management.
"The strategic value of our open source and open standard
projects is now widely recognized not only in the technology and
data engineering departments of financial institutions, but
directly in the most critical areas of the business like front
office and compliance organizations in buy-side and sell-side
firms." said Gabriele Columbro,
Executive Director of FINOS and General Manager of Linux Foundation
Europe. "That's why I am excited to welcome OS-Climate to the FINOS
Community and enable a much improved inter- and
intra-organizational collaboration model on such a consequential
problem, at a time when the demand for climate and ESG data and
analytics solutions is in high demand from 'front office'
clients."
This focused collaborative effort provides a real opportunity to
drive substantial environmental benefits through climate and
sustainability-aligned capital reallocation, while delivering
exceptional business value for financial institutions and
corporations worldwide.
To learn more about OS-Climate, please
visit os-climate.org. To learn about joining the
OS-Climate Supplemental Directed Fund, you can join FINOS and then
apply through the Membership page. For more information
about FINOS, its strategic initiatives, and how to get involved,
please visit FINOS.org and our Member Benefits
page.
About FINOS
FINOS (The Fintech Open Source Foundation) is a
nonprofit whose mission is to foster the adoption of open source,
open standards and collaborative software development practices in
financial services. It is the center for open source developers and
the financial services industry to build new technology projects
that have a lasting impact on business operations. As a regulatory
compliant platform, the foundation enables developers from these
competing organizations to collaborate on projects with a strong
propensity for mutualization.
FINOS has led the campaign to improve awareness of the real
business benefit of collaborating with peers on the pre-competitive
layers of software while improving the readiness of developers in
these firms to participate in critical open source software
projects enabling codebase contributions from both the buy- and
sell-side firms and other major financial institutions, fintechs
and technology consultancies as part of its membership. Get
involved and join FINOS as a Member. To stay up to
date on FINOS news, events, podcasts, blogs, and more, sign
up here.
About OS-Climate
OS-Climate (OS-C) is a non-profit community of
collaboration between companies and partners developing data and
analytics solutions for climate-aligned finance, investing,
business, policy and regulation, and economic development. Its
mission is to help members drive progress toward Net Zero and Paris
Climate Accord goals while capturing significant business value for
themselves and their customers. Member projects tackle problems in
regulatory compliance, vulnerability assessment and risk
management, and transition investing, and well as data
infrastructures and data management. All data and code developed in
OS-C projects is an unrestricted public good that members and
others can incorporate in proprietary and commercial products and
services. To learn more about OS-Climate, please visit
os-climate.org.
About Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is
the world's leading home for collaboration on open source software,
hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects are
critical to the world's infrastructure, including Linux,
Kubernetes, Node.js, ONAP, OpenChain, OpenSSF, PyTorch, RISC-V,
SPDX, and more. The Linux Foundation focuses on leveraging best
practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and
solution providers to create sustainable models for open
collaboration. For more information, please visit us at
linuxfoundation.org.
Media Contact:
Julia Telford
Stanton Communications, Inc
jtelford@stantoncomm.com
+1 (716) 796-8313
Patrick Doherty
FINOS
patrick.doherty@finos.org
+ (206) 245 8574
View original
content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/os-climate-joins-forces-with-finos-to-enable-industry-wide-open-collaboration-for-climate-and-sustainability-aligned-finance-302182585.html
SOURCE The Linux Foundation