Open source software has been pivotal to DBS Bank’s digital transformation journey, paving the way for access to innovations that are at the forefront of technology, according to the bank’s group CIO David Gledhill.

Speaking to Computer Weekly in an exclusive interview, Gledhill noted that besides tapping enterprise-grade open source products from the likes of Red Hat, DBS also experiments with open source projects and algorithms in key aspects of its IT operations.

DBS’s data analytics initiatives, for example, are built on Apache Spark, Python and Hadoop, as well as databases such as PostgreSQL and MariaDB, all of which enable the bank to leverage the best of open source technologies, Gledhill said.

Gledhill admitted that apart from Linux, DBS uses open source software mostly in the platform layer, noting that the open source applications space is still in its infancy. “We’re not going to have our core banking systems on open source any time soon,” he said.

The bank, Southeast Asia’s largest by market capitalisation, currently uses Red Hat OpenShift and Pivotal Cloud Foundry as its application platforms. Gledhill said DBS chose the two platforms because it “didn’t want to bet on just one horse”.

“Frankly, we still don’t know who will be the winner of that race, so maybe we will stay with two platforms which still have a lot of components that we want to use,” he said.

But DBS is not just a user of open source software. Gledhill said the bank may well be contributing its own projects to the open source community in future.

“The idea of having an open source DBS platform has its advantages,” he said. “For one thing, if developers know their source code is going to be published, they will be much more careful about how they write it because they will get the biggest peer review ever, so our code quality will go up.”

Meanwhile, DBS is already participating in some open source projects, and is looking to contribute to open source software tooling, artificial intelligence (AI) models and projects focused on data – areas where it has benefited the most from open source, Gledhill said.