Financial Services Institutions Look to Open Source
Today’s financial services institutions must innovate and evolve their technology to remain competitive during a time of great disruption. The need for rapid innovation and increasing digitalization is shining a light on the IT complexity many financial services institutions now face — untangling years of layered legacy systems.
Legacy IT systems dominate many large financial services institutions, and it is safe to say that highly customized applications are a major issue. Many financial services institutions have needed to build rather than buy applications to meet the specific requirements of the banking industry and to create service differentiation. However, many of these systems now need to be modernized to take advantage of newer and more capable technologies available today, and many technology leaders now need to decide whether to keep or migrate these applications to newer technology platforms. As these decisions are made, it is clear that open source is becoming a pillar for IT strategies across the financial services industry.

Increasingly, financial services institutions are building new applications on open source-based platforms. The maturity and broad functionality of open source is proven, and there are no longer questions about its suitability and reliability. Adoption of open source is no longer being driven only by its attractive lower cost but rather the rapid pace of innovation and extreme flexibility it offers.
IT departments recognize that open source solutions, particularly in data management, enable them to address many of the challenges they face, resulting in more agile architectures that are highly responsive to customer needs. Furthermore, as open source is developed with agility in mind, financial services companies can build modern infrastructures that allow for modular adoption of applications and iterative approaches to development.
The EDB Postgres Platform gives financial services institutions the flexibility to plan their future IT strategies, enabling them to gradually evolve their data management strategy from closed source to open source. They can maintain their existing databases where required and migrate to open source-based platforms in an application-transparent way, while leveraging their existing skill sets and operational procedures. EDB Postgres Data Adapters enable IT departments to integrate data from other data sources, such as NoSQL and Hadoop, with EDB Postgres, giving companies a consistent view of all the data in their organizations. EDB Postgres can extend the life of legacy systems, federating the data to new applications over time. For Oracle databases, EDB offers a Migration Toolkit to provide a smooth transition to modern open source-based database technologies. As EDB Postgres is based on SQL, and EDB Postgres Advanced Server provides comprehensive PL/SQL compatibility for Oracle®, this means little re-training for Database Administrators (DBAs) and rapid migrations requiring very little coding changes. As a result, financial services companies are able to not only migrate, but also modernize their applications in an efficient manner.
Most financial services organizations are aggressively working to maximize the opportunities of the digital era. If you need to more clearly define your strategy, we can help you integrate EDB Postgres into your technology stack, and partner with you to ensure alignment of your goals and requirements with the potential of open source-based solutions. With a roadmap for success based on a reference library of proven blueprints, solution tool sets, and API integration designs, the result is a blueprint and architecture roadmap based on Postgres best practices and your business objectives.
-Marc Linster, Ph.D. I Senior Vice President, Product Development, EnterpriseDB