Accenture released an annual report in which it identified ten trends that will shape the banking industry in the years to come. Trend number eight caught our attention: “The future is open source.”

According to the report:

A key strategy has been to switch from proprietary to open operating systems. China is a good example: to boost innovation, its government and its central bank, the PBoC, have been encouraging banks to move to an opensource model and foundation. Over the past five years openEuler, an open-source operating system originally developed by Huawei in 2019, is believed to have achieved a total of 10 million deployments, half of which are estimated to have taken place in 2024 alone. It is currently the leading operating system in the country, with a 50% share of new deployments. Notably, many of China’s largest banks, including four of the world’s largest, are among those that have adopted the software.

The report lists some of the benefits of open source in fintech:

Open systems also encourage collaboration across different platforms and vendors, facilitating interoperability that enhances productivity and efficiency.

This is exactly the value proposition of COSS fintech products like Formance.

The report makes some bold predictions for the next five years:

Banks will have fully embraced open-source architectures, enabling unparalleled agility and efficiency in their operations. Open-source systems—on-prem and in the cloud—will become the foundation of banking infrastructure, driving innovation, reducing costs and enhancing security. Banks will increasingly collaborate and share common industry code that benefits the entire industry—much like wi-fi standards—enabling open-source banks to collaborate more seamlessly with fintechs and each other.

These kinds of forecasts by the Accentures of the world often become self-fulfilling prophesies. Early stage fintech startups that are contemplating different distribution models would be wise to take note.