First Digital-Only Bank in China Joins Linux Foundation

WeBank will collaborate with global open source community to advance innovative banking with a federated learning framework

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., September 17, 2019 – The Linux Foundation today announced that WeBank is joining at the Gold level. It joins Alibaba, Dell, Facebook, Toyota, Uber and Verizon among other Linux Foundation members at this level.

WeBank is both the first privately-owned bank and the first digital-only bank in China. It was built with technology at its core and is committed to promoting innovative technologies. It recently led the transfer of the FATE (Federated AI Technology Enabler) to the Linux Foundation. FATE is a federated learning framework that fosters collaboration across companies and institutes to perform AI model training and inference in accordance with user privacy, data confidentiality and government regulations.

“WeBank embodies the values and ideals inherent in open source development, things like innovation and collaboration. Its leadership on projects like FATE demonstrate its commitment, and we look forward to its deepening work with Linux Foundation projects and communities,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation.

“WeBank understands the value of collaboration and that no one can innovate alone. The Linux Foundation is able to connect us with a diverse community of open source projects and members around the world,” said Tianjian Chen, Deputy General Manager of AI, WeBank.

As a high-tech full-digital bank built on open source software, WeBank aims to initiate a global banking innovation based on open-source software ecosystem. It will initially contribute to FATE, Linux Foundation AI, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, LF Edge and Confidential Computing Consortium.

About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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