Scotiabank has announced it will share bank-developed applications with the open-source software community. This move marks a significant milestone in Scotiabank’s digital transformation, stated the bank July 25.

The announcement was made by Justin Arbuckle, Senior Vice President and leader of The Platform Organization at Scotiabank, in a customer keynote at the Google Cloud Next '18 conference in San Francisco.

Accelerator Pipeline

Scotiabank has shared the first component of its Accelerator Pipeline, a tool created by The Platform Organization (PLATO), a Scotiabank unit responsible for helping the bank's application teams create new services more rapidly. The Accelerator Pipeline has cut the time required to prove that new services meet the bank's stringent control objectives from one month to about an hour, says the bank.

"The Accelerator crystalizes changes in working methods and approaches, such as Scrum and Agile, by allowing people to focus on the software and their customers, not checklists," Arbuckle said.

Invited to contribute improvements

Sharing components of the Accelerator Pipeline with the open-source community means software engineers are invited to contribute improvements to the code, or to make use of it for their own projects, via GitHub, the world's largest open-source community.

"PLATO is structured like a little software company inside a bank," Arbuckle said. "We share the principles of software companies, including the belief that open-source allows for contributors to improve software, as well as attracting attention and interest in working here among software engineers who value open-sourcing."