Founded by ex-Cisco engineers more than three years ago, MoneySwitch has developed a custom, IP-based credit and debit card transaction processing platform and will begin active trading by the end of the year.

MoneySwitch cofounder and engineer Andrew Rothwell told Computerworld they spent six to 12 months just trying to understand the business, and were cash-poor at the start.

"We were looking at open source technologies versus a chargeable product and we thought 'let's look at some open source technologies and see what they are like'," Rothwell said.

"We discovered these open source projects are quite widespread and are incredibly well supported. So we came to the conclusion that a lot of the open source products are so reliable and so well supported that why would we even consider looking at chargeable products."

So MoneySwitch built a transaction processing platform based on Linux, MySQL, the Jetty Web server, and Java, and immediately realized the benefits of working with the open source community.