Fintech nonprofit partners with EDM Council for cloud data framework project

The EDM Council has announced a new partnership with the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS) to further promote the implementation of the Cloud Data Management Capabilities (CDMC) framework.

Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM, Microsoft and other major tech giants joined forces with the EDM Council — a cross-industry trade association for data management and analytics — in September to create the CDMC framework.

More than 100 companies worked on the project, which involved developing a comprehensive set of cloud data management capabilities, standards and best practices for cloud, multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud implementations while also incorporating automated key controls for protecting sensitive data.

The organizations said the partnership between the EDM Council and the Fintech Open Source Foundation was pushed by Morgan Stanley and LSEG, which are both members of the organizations.

Gabriele Columbro, executive director of FINOS, said the pan-industry partnership shows the “continued momentum and superior value of open source to prove regulatory compliance in the financial services industry.” 

“Cloud and data management are critical to all actors in the financial services value chain, and we believe having a truly open approach to demonstrate compliance is the only way to build trust in the industry,” Columbro said. 

Columbro added that financial institutions and fintech vendors “need to demonstrate to regulators that they comply with industry regulations when working with cloud service providers for their data management.” 

Morgan Stanley CIO for cloud and architecture Bobby Gilja said security and resilience for their businesses, clients and the market as a whole are critical to all members of the finance industry. 

“The FINOS and EDMC partnership gives us the platform to leverage the power of open source to collaborate on these critical challenges with our peers and partners to provide a consistent, standardized, and automatically verifiable level of security in the cloud which will ultimately deliver better and faster solutions for our clients,” Gilja said. 

The organizations explained that through the partnership, CSPs, fintechs and technology companies will be able to deliver their services while other firms “can specialize in proving compliance and certification to the CDMC standard.”

Regulators will also be able to use the CDMC Open Source implementation for enforcement purposes. 

With the newly created FINOS’ Open Compliance for CDMC project, the organizations say firms will be able to quickly comply with cloud data management best practices. The organizations are also planning automatic configuration deployments. 

“The Cloud Service Certification (CSC) project is about bringing together financial service institutions to deliver a comprehensive suite of open source cloud controls that enable us to demonstrate adherence with regulatory and internal requirements,” said Mark Hoare, open source software programme lead at Deutsche Bank. 

“Through this new partnership we can combine the EDMC’s comprehensive standards and policies with the cross-industry representation of the CSC project, enabling us to leverage the natural synergy between them to overcome challenges and accelerate our momentum.” 

Mike Meriton, COO and co-founder of EDM Council, added that open-source cloud testing technology is simplifying the challenges firms are facing, making it’s a natural fit to pair this capability with the CDMC framework. 

“The collaborative efforts from both the FINOS and EDM Council teams will help accelerate trusted cloud adoption,” Meriton said. “This is an important first step towards making the CDMC open source suite universally available and we look forward to offering similar automated test processes for other industry sectors.”