Angel Diaz has brought an open-source mindset to Discover. He led the organization to join the Linux Foundation and the Fintech Open Source Foundation and has encouraged developers to work collaboratively following open-source principles.
Diaz, vice president of technology capabilities and innovation at Discover Financial Services, has been involved with open-source standards bodies like the Linux Foundation and Apache for years, he said in an interview.
Banks sometimes have mixed feelings about using open-source software. There's a security double-edged sword: Having developers from different organizations work on code can help make it more secure, but openness can also help hackers see vulnerabilities.
Diaz points out that there are two ends of the spectrum when it comes to software development.
"One is an ivory tower kind of approach," Diaz said. "And the other is, maybe we try to take the best of what we do here in Discover and create an inner democracy. That's the approach we took."
Most enterprises today use upward of 60% open-source code, Diaz said, in vendor products and internal development.
"There are very well-defined ways of bringing in open source and managing that within the right risk and control guards," Diaz said. Security is no longer an issue, he argued.
"You have more eyes on the code," he said. "The more eyes, the more secure."
Discover engineers work in existing communities contributing code within the Linux Foundation.
"I'm very, very proud of this, because this is a space that I've always loved and been active in," Diaz said. The community work helps to build products faster and to make them accessible from the start. One example is making sure the right indicators are in place on a website to let a screen reader do its job.
Without a close connection between design and writing code, "it's very brittle, it's very error prone," Diaz said. "What ends up happening is you have to spend lots of time just fixing stuff."
Discover puts its developers in "dojos" of eight to 12 people, where they sit side by side and learn from each other.
In other tech developments, Discover has been using robotic process automation that has resulted in two million hours given back, $57 million in financial benefit and a 500% reduction of time, Diaz said. It's also
