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Simon Redfern, TweetCEO of TESOBE & Open Bank Project Founder
Biography: Simon Redfern
Simon Redfern is the CEO of TESOBE and founder of the Open Bank Project. He is a seasoned technologist with over 25 years experience in IT. He studied electronic engineering in Manchester in the early 80's focusing on real-time programming and digital systems, followed by relational databases and then the web in the early 90's. Since then, Simon has worked as a software developer, architect, CTO and DBA on numerous web based platforms. Always keen to explore emerging technologies (recently Scala and NoSQL), Simon is also a composer / musician (piano, electronics) and as such enjoys inhabiting the borderlands of art and technology and cross discipline creative collaborations. Simon is a keen supporter of open source and open data believing they are a sustainable force for social good.
Twitter: @simsysims
Presentation: TweetOpen Bank Project - Bank as a Platform, Transparency as an Asset
The Open Bank Project enables banks to innovate by leveraging open APIs, open source and open data. It makes banking data more accessible via an ecosystem of apps and services built on an enterprise ready open source stack.
Using the Open Bank Project, software developers can easily leverage a common set of banking APIs and so enable banking customers and their stakeholders such as auditors, regulators, shareholders and donors to freshly interact with banks on mobile, tablet and emerging platforms. The Open Bank Project allows customisable views on transaction data enabling a sliding scale of financial privacy and transparency spanning fully secured to fully open data. Added location, social and other meta data are shared across applications further enhancing the ecosystem and bank as a platform concept.
The Open Bank Project is designed to plug into core banking and authentication systems and is pre-configured to use the industry standard OAuth thus enhancing the bank's role as the gatekeeper of authentication and digital gateway to data. Certified Apps and services are discoverable via the bank app store further enticing customers to the bank.
The Open Bank Project leverages Open Source (Scala, Postgres, Jetty) and is released under AGPL and commercial licenses from TESOBE.
But how does a small bootstrapped startup even get the attention of large banks?
Simon Redfern, CEO of TESOBE and founder of the Open Bank Project, will explain how open source, open data (and a little music too!) has helped - and illustrate the relevance of open APIs in banking, why they are important for all of us, and ultimately, how "Open" leads to a better customer experience.