Open-Sourcing Code, Collaboration -- Fintech -- Changing Financial Services Industry

Within the silos of incumbent financial services, so-called fintech companies are good at picking off one thing only and doing it well. This approach is also taken within data science where a lot of the properly intelligent work is about understanding the domain (problem) and how best to use the information/data for the problem you have. In doing so, a fintech approach -- collaboration, open-sourcing code -- is helping to gradually change the culture of finance, even in some hitherto heavily guarded domains. "Without this specialization and domain knowledge, it's very hard to rise above the noise. However, the algorithms themselves are often applicable in many areas or problems, and we are probably seeing decreasing specialization here," said Dr. Tristan Fletcher, research director of Thought Machine.