"The beauty is that we are not only consumers of the product; we can feed any bug fixes or design deficiencies that we rectify ourselves back into the community," Rothwell said. "If we can get the changes into the next release we don't have to do anything."

Rothwell said if MoneySwitch went to a "big vendor" product "we just wouldn't get any kind of action or support like that".

With the luxury of going into a greenfield IT business, the MoneySwitch engineers architected the applications such that if it needed to migrate from one open source product to another, it could do so transparently.

"We run Red Hat Enterprise in the data center and the development environment is Fedora Linux, but now all the guys are looking at Ubuntu [as] the tools that sit on top of it are great," Rothwell said, adding the backend system could also change from Red Hat.

MoneySwitch's vice president of engineering, Peter Haig said the company's goal is to be nimble and ensure open source projects don't get "tangled" in the code so they are kept "clearly interfaced off".