Open Source in Financial Services

Open Source is often regarded as a bad thing in corporate Financial Services, although this does depend on the personal views of the IT architect and/or CIO. When open source software is used, it is often in the guise of a utility component within in-house developed systems, or similarly within vendor systems. No corporate that I am aware of would entrust their mission-critical data to an unsupported system. And that is generally how Open Source is viewed - unsupported.

An interesting move to change that is a consortium that is working on an Open Source insurance system. Currently only for non-Life, Insurance In a Box (iabforge.wikidot.com) is an interesting experiment. Built using Ruby on Rails, it also takes an interesting approach to how to store the data - as XML.