The FINOS 2025 Report finds that financial-services organizations increasingly see open source as strategic infrastructure, not just a way to cut software costs. Its survey points to perceived gains in quality, speed and business value, but also to gaps in measuring returns, managing supply-chain risks and enabling safe contributions.
What is the FINOS 2025 Report?
The 2025 State of Open Source in Financial Services is the fifth annual study produced by FINOS with Linux Foundation Research, GitHub and Scott Logic. The 55-page report combines a 2025 survey of 209 respondents, GitHub activity analysis and interviews with technology leaders. It examines how banks, fintechs and financial-services vendors use, contribute to and govern open-source software.
The findings describe respondents and analyzed activity; they are not a census of every financial institution. GitHub data may miss work conducted through developers’ personal accounts, and the survey’s specialist sample may not represent the entire sector. Treat the percentages as indicators of reported views and practices, not universal industry measurements.
How important is open source to financial services?
In the 2025 survey, 87% of respondents said open source is critical to their own organization’s future, and 84% said it is essential to the financial-services sector. The report describes a shift from treating open source mainly as a way to avoid licence costs toward using it as shared infrastructure for standards, compliance work and innovation.
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Adoption does not automatically mean an organization contributes upstream. Half of respondents said their organization had a defined open-source strategy. Financial institutions reported higher adoption than fintechs: 55% versus 38% in the report’s comparison. Those figures describe adoption, not the share of organizations actively contributing to projects.
What value do organizations report—and is there a financial return?
Respondents connected open source to several kinds of value, not only direct savings. In the 2025 survey, 63% strongly agreed that it improves software quality; 62% associated it with lower software-ownership costs, 59% with business value, 58% with productivity and 51% with faster time to market. Separately, 93% said open source improves software quality in the report’s broader quality finding, as summarized by Linux Foundation Research.
Financial returns are emerging, but measurement is incomplete. Eighteen percent reported already realizing returns; the Linux Foundation’s summary says nearly one-fifth report more than $1 million in annual savings. For organizations with more than 10,000 employees, 38% estimated annual open-source savings above $1 million, while 45% said they did not know their savings. These are different measures: the large-organization estimates should not be read as a sector-wide savings rate, and the report does not establish a single average return for all firms.
The findings support a broader view of return on investment: software quality, delivery speed, resilience, standards work and talent development can matter alongside licence and ownership costs. An organization that tracks only avoided licence fees may miss these benefits; one that claims value without measuring it may struggle to justify contribution or governance investment.
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Where are the security and governance gaps?
Security concerns remain prominent. FINOS reports that 52% of respondents named vulnerabilities as their leading concern and 37% cited supply-chain attacks, while 43% said their organizations actively produce software bills of materials (SBOMs). The contrast points to an execution gap: awareness of exposure is not the same as having consistent visibility into software components and dependencies.
Licensing and legal uncertainty also affect whether firms contribute. FINOS found that unclear return on investment and legal or licensing concerns each affected 48% of respondents as barriers to contribution. The report’s emphasis is not to treat openness as a risk to eliminate, but to build governance and skills that let organizations participate responsibly.
Observed GitHub contribution activity offers one view of where work is happening: Python accounted for about 18% of financial-services open-source contributions, compared with Java at 7% and C# at 3%. These shares describe the analyzed GitHub activity, not the overall use of each language inside financial institutions.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What does the report suggest banks and fintechs should do?
The practical implication is to pair open-source use with accountable participation. A bank or fintech can use the report’s findings to shape a governance roadmap rather than treating adoption as a procurement decision alone.
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- Set a strategy and ownership model. Establish clear responsibility for open-source policy, approvals and escalation—often through an open-source program office (OSPO) or equivalent governance function.
- Make contribution paths usable. Define how staff can contribute, who reviews legal and security questions, and how project work aligns with business objectives. Track outcomes such as software quality, delivery, shared standards and talent development as well as direct cost savings.
- Strengthen software supply-chain practice. Build repeatable processes for dependency visibility, vulnerability response and SBOM production instead of relying on general awareness of risk.
- Evaluate AI and standards work for openness and control. The report identifies AI as an opportunity, while recommending deliberate skills and talent strategies, consideration of open approaches such as open-weight models, and responsible governance, including the FINOS AI Governance Framework. Assess interoperability, resilience and vendor neutrality alongside immediate functionality.
The central comparison is not simply open source versus proprietary software. It is unmanaged consumption versus governed participation, and short-term cost accounting versus a fuller assessment of quality, speed, resilience and shared capability.
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