Open Source in Finance Forum Toronto 2026

As financial services increasingly embrace open-source collaboration, RBC shares how this commitment positions us as a technology leader driving innovation across the industry. This keynote explores how strategic investment in open-source partnerships enables faster development, enhanced security, and the collaborative solutions that shape the future of finance.

The AI powering financial services today traces a direct line from open science labs at the University of Toronto and Waterloo — and the open source ecosystem that carried those ideas to the world. This talk frames that lineage as both a point of pride and a call to action for the finance industry. You are here, in this city, at this moment in the history of technology and business — and that is not a coincidence. The challenge now is to honor that legacy by working together as a community to ensure AI is rolled out responsibly, transparently, and for the long-term benefit of the institutions and people who depend on it.

As banks and financial institutions move AI from the testing phase into everyday use, a practical challenge emerges: it is difficult to rely on AI systems when you can't see exactly how they work. In a highly regulated industry, sending sensitive financial data through closed, third-party AI models raise real privacy, security, and compliance concerns.

In this keynote, we will explore why Sovereign AI is a practical approach for the financial sector. We will discuss how the open-source ecosystem provides the clear visibility and security needed to meet strict enterprise-wide risk management rules for AI systems, including OSFI guidelines. Finally, we will share how Red Hat helps organizations build trusted AI in financial services. By using flexible, open platforms, financial institutions can run AI workloads anywhere, ensuring they keep their data, infrastructure, and future innovation fully under their own control.

Locking down AI is likely to cost financial institutions more than what it would protect. Core AI techniques behave like infrastructure, while the competitive advantages lie at the edges, on data and domain expertise. Drawing on Vector Institute's co-development models - with more than 250,000 hours contributed by our Industry partners - transparency and community show a fast path to trustworthy, production-grade AI.

The Innovate.DTCC Hackathon brought the financial ecosystem together to design AI solutions that move beyond proofs-of-concept toward a scalable, open-source reality. Participants delivered a wide variety of innovative work, demonstrating how shared investment accelerates progress on complex, system-wide challenges. Mia Gougisha will highlight the winning projects that exemplify this collaborative power and the value of onboarding these solutions into the FINOS ecosystem, ensuring that the strongest ideas don’t stop at the finish line but continue on a clear path to industry-ready deployment. Join us to learn more about these projects and how you can get involved.

Financial institutions operate some of the world’s most demanding computing environments, managing hundreds of thousands of cores to power everything from sub-second pricing to massive multi-hour risk simulations. Yet, for too long, this scale has been locked behind silos, leading to fragmented infrastructure with utilization rates as low as 15% to 40%. As the industry increases AI-driven workloads, these inefficiencies will be amplified.

In this panel discussion, industry leaders will share how they are collaborating on open standards and projects (including HTC-Grid, OpenGRIS, Open Resource Broker and 5-Spot) to build a unified, AI-ready approach to high-performance computing (HPC). Drawing on real-world experience, they will discuss how these open technologies simplify access to compute, improve utilization, reduce wasted capacity, and optimize the balance between fixed and elastic compute.

Join us to learn how this collaboration will enable risk, quant, and AI teams to operate efficiently at the scale needed for the next generation of financial innovation.