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What's stopping banks from creating FOSS (or atleast open-source) banking solutions (apps)? (fost.hu)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by nIi7WJVZwktT4Ze@fost.hu to c/foss@beehaw.org

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Let's say, I create a bank with the caveat that all of my banking phone apps and webapps are FOSS (or if they depend on non-free components — banks probably do to communicate with each other —, then just OSS). Am I going to be behind the competition by doing this?

If the most secure crypto algorithms are the ones that are public, can we ensure the security of a bank's apps by publicizing it?

Are they not doing this because they secretly collect a lot of data (on top of your payment history because of the centralized nature of card payments) through these apps?

EDIT: Clarifying question: Is there a technical reason they don't publicize their code or is it just purely corporate greed and nothing else?

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[–] MJBrune@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Absolutely, you are the company paying for all the work of the FOSS app, having to ensure it meets FCC regulations for banking. It's a huge mess. Costs millions to do. Pull requests can't just be taken they must be studied by several teams and a lot of the time it'd be easier and better if that code came internally so you'd be able to directly communicate with the author. That said FINOS exists, https://www.finos.org/ They are more about adopting the usage of open source libraries rather than writing their own though.

Overall you'd get no to little benefit and lose a competitive edge while causing more technical headaches following standards to open source your code.

[–] debanqued@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Absolutely, you are the company paying for all the work of the FOSS app, having to ensure it meets FCC regulations for banking. It’s a huge mess. Costs millions to do.

FCC regs, really? That’s comms. First I’m hearing the FCC regulates banks. But surely those regs must be quite lax because banks in the US are quite sloppy. One-factor auth is good enough.. if someone gets your username & PW they can spend your money. US banks are putting their websites on Cloudflare, so all sensitive banking info and transactions is shared with a tech giant. Pretty much everything is outsourced, even simply printing statements, which puts a lot of eggs in one basket. US banks get breached regularly, like Capone who didn’t even bother to encrypt data at rest on Amazon’s server, so an Amazon contractor leaked the data.

With such lousy regulation, would it really be hard to get approval for a FOSS app?