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

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SOURCE The Linux Foundation