The Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), a nonprofit that promotes open innovation in financial services, today announces the release of the first major version of the Financial Desktop Connectivity and Collaboration Consortium (FDC3) standard. Founded and contributed to FINOS by OpenFin, this initiative brings universal connectivity and standards to the financial industry’s desktop applications. FDC3 is starting a new era in addressing long-standing challenges to the user experience caused by fragmentation within the financial software market.
Banks and hedge funds use a multitude of in-house and vendor applications, and rely on a largely closed ecosystem of desktop tools which enable core functions around trading, market data, order management, and analytics. Lack of interoperability between applications results in inefficient manual processes, which frustrate end-users and increase operational risk. FDC3 addresses this problem by bringing standards to the financial desktop to support modern app workflows, similar to mobile experience, for sharing and discoverability of applications.
“The FDC3 interoperability standard represents the first fundamental building block for an open, organically evolving ecosystem of applications on traders’ desktops. This encourages fair competition between fintech vendors on a level playing field,” said Gabriele Columbro, executive director of FINOS. “The end game for this is to enable optimal user experience delivered with high levels of efficiency. We are proud and thankful to our contributors for achieving this important milestone in less than a year, and we encourage firms across the financial services industry to implement and contribute to this open standard.”
“OpenFin couldn’t be more excited to see the FDC3 community reach this critical milestone. The velocity and the level of engagement that we’ve witnessed in the group is a testament to how much the industry cares about interoperability, and neutral open source collaboration,” said Nicholas Kolba, Chief Product Officer, OpenFin and FDC3 program co-founder and chair. “For too long in financial services, humans have been the integration layer between their applications. Now, with the FDC3 1.0 standards ratified and released, we can enable automation and make the humans smarter, faster, and better."
FDC3 will bring a new level of productivity and workflow automation to financial institutions. The core goal of FDC3 is to make it possible for fintech developers to create applications—whether in-house or third party—that can interact seamlessly without the need for bilateral agreements or proprietary APIs. For example, users can click on a symbol in a portfolio application to easily discover and launch relevant analytic or trading tools—without requiring prior development work between the portfolio app and any others involved in the workflow.
Kim Prado, Global Head of Client Insight, Banking & Digital Channels Technology at RBC Capital Markets said: “We’re delighted to see pan-industry initiatives like FDC3 come to fruition and look forward to implementing the standard to improve our productivity and workflows in a scalable manner. This improves developer efficiency and most importantly the experience for both our internal users and clients."
“Adaptive believes that the industry is best served by leveraging open standards on the financial desktop. The standards defined by FDC3 allow our clients to not reinvent the wheel, but to focus on what matters: solving their users' problems. Across the industry, we are building desktop ecosystems that offer the same fluidness and interoperability as modern mobile applications. Adaptive believes that FDC3 is a huge step forward and lays the foundation for open collaboration both within and between financial organizations,” said Matt Barrett, CEO of Adaptive Financial Consulting.
“Our clients need fast and seamless access to the data and analytics that power their investment workflows, which often require multiple applications,” said Don Nilsson, Senior Director and Head of Product Development, FactSet. “The industry will greatly benefit from adopting standards that allow for smooth integration across different solutions. We are proud to be part of FINOS’s efforts to create a truly open and collaborative financial ecosystem for our clients.”
“At Glue42 we see a future without vendor lock-in driven by the availability of independent and open interfaces; FDC3 v1 is a major step forward,” said Leslie Spiro, CEO, Glue42, a Tick42 company. “App developers are in the trenches of rapid change and their focus should be on driving a superior user experience—not on building proprietary platforms. FDC3 enables these developers at buy- and sell-side firms to integrate in-house and third-party systems faster than ever before. Reflecting on the first year of FDC3, I am most pleased by the way FINOS has enabled a community of customers, partners and competitors to work together for the benefit of all.”
Matt Jamieson, Head of Fixed Income Desktop Technology, NatWest Markets, said: “Using the FDC3 open standard will help reduce the time-to-market for delivery of new desktop technology to our colleagues, and will allow vendors and customers to interoperate with NatWest Markets’ desktop products and services without being restricted to proprietary standards.”
“Refinitiv has always championed the promotion of open standards, both through our Eikon platform and other data solutions,” said Robert Coletti, Head of Desktop Solutions, Refinitiv, and FINOS board member. “We recognize that when companies collaborate to create seamless and interoperable workflows powered with data, it drives value that ultimately benefits our clients.”
With the release of a stable 1.0 version of the FDC3 open standard, a number of initial implementations are already in development by existing FINOS Members and contributors, and FINOS will promote implementation across the wider community of vendors, buy-side and sell-side.
FDC3 was fully ratified in November 2018. 50+ financial organizations supported development of the standard built on the active contributions of Adaptive, Citadel, FactSet, GreenKey, IHS Markit, JP Morgan, OpenFin, Refinitiv, Scott Logic, Tick42, and Wellington.
To evaluate and implement the standard, visit the FINOS FDC3 site. To contribute, visit the FINOS FDC3 Github Repository.
