Banking and financial domain is one of the major customers of open source softwares. The reason, why financial institutions are moving to Open source are freedom of choice, being able to adapt and change the software, support for standards, flexibility, better quality through the open development process and the possibility of community involvement - to name a few.

Despite official edicts to the contrary, there is an enormous amount of open source work going on in the banking domain. To give just one example, a book on perl(One of the leading open source development language) have been sold in large quantities into virtually every Wall Street investment bank. An another example is, Greg Olson, the CEO of Sendmail Inc., recounts a conversation with the IS department at a large bank. He noticed from characteristics of the mail sent out from the bank that they used sendmail, and asked if they'd go on record. They denied that they used sendmail, until he showed them the tracks their email server was leaving in cyberspace.[1]

One of the reasons why open source software is best for banking that they have fewer security flaws than proprietary software. With more eyes able to look at the underlying source code, bugs should be found and squashed much faster.

Many banks uses open source solutions for their requirements, to name a few, Michael Gallagher, manager of architecture strategy at ABN Amro, states that "People are using more open source than they realize,". ABN Amro uses open source tools to create some of its banking applications, most prominently its Mortgage.com Web-based service. The company continues to look for new areas to apply open source, and it's considering the use of open-source business-intelligence and reporting tools based on Eclipse, an open-source development environment.[2] An another example is Red Hat, One of the leading provider of Linux and open source technology, has enabled the adoption of open source technology in Central Bank of India. Large investment banks in India are already running on open source platforms.[3]

1. Sources: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/opensource/news/myths_1199.html Accessed on march 25th 2007. 2. Sources: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=171200352 Accessed on march 25th 2007. 3. Sources: http://news.moneycontrol.com/mccode/news/article/news_article.php?autono=235936 Accessed on march 25th 2007.