[OSFF Panel] Can Open Data Solve Financial Data Pain Points?

In this episode of the Open Source in Finance Podcast, host Grizz Griswold introduces an expert OSFF panel moderated by Hilary Carter (Linux Foundation) featuring Jose Plehn (Bright Query / open-data.org), Nora Anwar (Overture Maps Foundation), and Jane Gavronsky (FINOS COO). The panelists explore why financial services urgently need a shared open data commons to eliminate duplicate reference data maintenance, establish a universal entity graph across companies, people, and places, and ground AI models to prevent hallucinations. 🗽 Catch Us in New York! Ready to explore open data, shared entity graphs, and collaborative open-source engineering? Join global financial technology leaders at OSFF New York on November 4–5, 2026.🎟️ Register Now: https://hubs.ly/Q04n_bZL0🔥 20% OFF DISCOUNT CODE: 26YTOSFFNY20C 🕒 Timestamps:0:00 Podcast Intro with Grizz Griswold & Panel Setup1:34 Panelist Introductions: Bright Query, Overture Maps & FINOS3:45 Why Open Data Matters: Breaking Down Financial Data Silos5:00 The Vision of an Open Entity Graph: Companies, People & Places7:57 Governance & Community Scale: Cross-Referencing Master IDs11:06 Winners & Losers in the Open Data Landscape13:11 Financial Reference Data Pain Points: The "Light Switch" Analogy16:55 Crowdsourcing Entity Resolution & Identifier Mapping20:13 Overture Maps Origin Story: Meta, Microsoft, Amazon & TomTom Collaboration25:06 Geospatial Data Use Cases: From Insurance Risk to Fraud Detection29:10 Open Data for AI Grounding: Reducing LLM Hallucinations with RAG34:07 Success Metrics & How Financial Institutions Can Join 📊 The Problem: The "Light Switch" Reference Data Tax & Fragmented SilosRedundant Reference Data Maintenance: Financial institutions spend millions of dollars individually ingesting, cleaning, and enhancing identical vendor reference datasets just to keep basic systems operational. Entity Resolution & Identifier Disconnects: Mismatched entity IDs (LEIs, CUSIPs, ISINs, addresses) across disparate corporate databases create massive operational friction, slowing down KYC/KYB compliance, onboarding, and risk management. 🏗️ The Solution: A Shared Open Data Commons & Global Entity GraphGlobal Reference & Entity Graph: Bright Query and open-data.org are establishing an open global directory covering over 400M companies, 1B people, and 200+ countries mapped with unique, permanent entity IDs. Overture Maps Collaboration Model: Following the proven Linux Foundation model of Overture Maps (founded by Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and TomTom), competitors mutualize base data maintenance costs so teams can focus on proprietary innovation layers. Grounding AI & RAG Pipelines: Joining LLM knowledge graphs to deterministic open entity graphs drastically reduces hallucinations during AI training and inference, providing the verifiable data lineage required in regulated finance. ⚙️ Why This Matters for Financial Engineering Mutualizing Non-Competitive Costs: Crowdsourcing entity matching, validation rules, and cross-referencing tables removes the "thankless" overhead of reference data cleanup across buy-side and sell-side firms. Spatial & Corporate Context for AI Agents: Integrating open entity graphs with spatial systems (GERS IDs) gives AI agents accurate organizational and geographic awareness to automate risk assessment and site selection. 🌐 More about FINOS: https://www.finos.org/ 📧 Join our newsletter: https://www.finos.org/sign-up 🎙️ Listen to our Open Source in Finance Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@FINOS/podcasts LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/finosfoundation