Open Banking : Banks = Open Source : Software

Open banking is on the way and it can do great things, we just have to look at the lessons of open source to see why.

Thirty Six years ago, when I started my journey in the IT sector as a software programmer, I wrote a lot of software in various fields. Every time, the biggest concern I and my colleagues had was how to hide our source code.

Then came the 90s and things changed. All of a sudden, I started to hear about a new trend: open your code and share your source.My reaction was along the lines of: What? Share my source? No way man!

It was undoubtedly a new way of thinking: if you open your software source, you can let others participate in your project and help you to build better software. You can benefit from the community, and you can create an ecosystem.

I might have been skeptical at first but Open Source teaches us an important lesson: sharing is good. When you open things up to other people, good things happen. We only have to look at what happened with Unix and what is happening now with Android to see why.

In the open source world, we reflect ourselves, our community needs as humans, our sociality and our will to share a bit of us with other people.

Arise open banking

Today we’re seeing another development, the Open Banking initiative which is telling banks: “Hey, you need to open your IT systems and your data to third parties”. I think a lot of people in…