The Syntasso team attended last month's FINOS Open Source in Finance Forum in London and learned a lot! We presented a joint session with Chris Plank from NatWest, had many amazing chats at our sponsored booth, and attended many very interesting sessions. We’ll offer a big thank you to all involved!
Here are our key takeaways and notes from the FINOS OSFF 2024 event!
Financial Services in the Age of AI
The opening keynote panel, “Navigating AI Adoption in Financial Services”, was superb! Colin Eberhardt, Ian Micallef, Emily Prince, and Cara Delia discussed how the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence impacts financial services, specifically software delivery and the use of large language models (LLMs).
Key learning:
AI is bringing new challenges to financial services, and we must react to this proactively.
AI is a new and powerful tool, but we need a new mental model for engaging with it (since AI does not always tell the truth)!
Financial organisations need to be responsible for adopting AI.
Tackling Bias in Software Engineering
The lunchtime keynote, “Practical Steps for Tackling Bias in Software Engineering in the Age of AI,” was equally thought-provoking.
Our key takeaways:
"People who are different to you will challenge you” Lee-Ann Sansom, FCCA
Questions to ask when using AI (or any software): “Can I do this? “how do I do this?” But most importantly, “Should I do this?” Jason Smith
“Inclusion shouldn't require a business case, like security, it needs to just be done as a part of a viable business” Declan O'Gorman
Thanks to the panellists Prachi Kasodhan Declan O'Gorman Lee-Ann Sansom, FCCA Jason Smith and Rimma Perelmuter
Building an Engineering Community
If we had to summarise this talk in one sentence, it would be, “Feel the fear and build your engineering community today!” James McLeod of NatWest Group gave a fantastic talk about why building software engineering communities is so important and advice on how to do it well.
Key takeaways:
Your community is evolving; you need to listen to them.
Give your community an identity, brand and sense of belonging.
Provide opportunities for community members; give to get!
Recognise and reward contributions.
Relatedly, we are also hearing a lot of chatter about "innersourcing" in the platform engineering community.
Unlocking Innovation: Platform as a Product in NatWest with Kratix
Although biased, this was the day's highlight for me, watching Chris Plank and Derik Evangelista tell the story of how NatWest Group are using Kratix to deliver "Platform as a Product."
Key challenges that NatWest Group uses Kratix to help with:
Offering capabilities to developers in a self-service manner through an API or portal.
The democratisation of the internal platform enables a “multi-player mode" for multiple teams to contribute their services and solutions to the platform.
Reducing cognitive load for developers by building “golden paths”, combining low-level components into higher-level abstractions through “Compound Promises”.
It was also awesome to see Kratix get a mention in the closing keynote!
Wrapping up: The community rocks!
As with all FINOS events, the community is what makes attending this so beneficial. The entire Syntasso team had a blast, and it was a lot of fun to catch up with financial friends old and new!
We'll offer another big thank you to the organisers, sponsors, and attendees!
Please reach out if we can help you and your team with your platform challenges. Whether you are just getting started, dealing with platform decay, or struggling to scale your solution, we can help.
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