How Long Until Your Bank Goes Open Source?

This week’s Fintech Focus podcast is booting up Linux and going open-source. We’re chatting with longtime friend of Benzinga and CEO of OpenFin Mazy Dar about the company’s growth and how the startup is changing the way banks deploy new technology.

Listen to the full episode here.

How Financial Services Needs To Take A Lesson From Mobile Developers

“Look at what's happened in the mobile world, and in Silicon Valley most of the really useful innovations of the last you know, five, ten years have come about on our mobile devices, and they've been enabled, principally by two operating systems. One is iOS, and the other one is Android. And so if you are Facebook, or Uber, or Snapchat, or any number of other apps that have been created in the last five, ten years, you have those two operating systems that are modern to build your app on top of.

“Unfortunately, the situation we're in, in financial services is we're primarily using Windows 7, which was released in 2009, and some of us are still on Windows XP, which was released in 2001. So, these are operating systems that don't provide you the basic capabilities that apps need nowadays, and that's essentially what OpenFin is solving, we're a layer that sits on top of Windows XP, 7, 8, 10, Mac, and Linux, and we modernize the desktop and provide the foundation that's needed by applications in the financial industry to really innovate and provide the end user experience that's required for financial applications.”

How Open Source Can Actually Ensure Greater Cybersecurity

“OpenFin comes in and dramatically changes the security paradigm where now you can build an app that looks and feels and behaves just like a native installed application, but in face it is not an installed application. It's a web application. It runs in the security sandbox. It has no access to the local operating system. Has no access to other apps on the desktop and where it needs access, let's say there's a good reason for it to want to read the file system or read the clipboard or something else, IT security can essentially authorize those features and it's only available if apps actually need it and it's understood why they need those features. It's under a completely different paradigm than the one we have today, but one that is critically needed in an environment where the security threats are increasing exponentially, and we just need a much, much better way of ensuring security than the security review process that we have in place.”