A newly formed group of major finance industry players announced an OpenFin-led initiative to bring universal connectivity and standards to all of the financial industry’s desktop applications. The group, known as the Financial Desktop Connectivity and Collaboration Consortium, or FDC3, is committed to addressing the increasingly fractured software landscape of capital markets.
OpenFin, the first operating system created specifically for finance, and the industry’s only technology designed to be unifying and application-agnostic, has contributed the open-source code that serves as the cornerstone for this new initiative. Members of the FDC3 include Algomi, AllianceBernstein, Barclays, BNP Paribas, ChartIQ, Citadel, Cloud9, FactSet, Fidessa, GreenKey, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, OpenFin, OTAS Technologies, RBC, TP ICAP, Wellington Management Company, and others.
When it comes to markets like securities finance, that aren’t liquid enough to be traded programmatically, there tend to be lots of screens, noted Mazy Dar, OpenFin’s CEO: “Wherever you have screens, you have this problem that the end user is often the integration layer,” he said. “They are the ones seeing what’s happening on one screen and rekeying that information on another screen to try and synthesize the information and make trading decisions, or other kinds of business decisions.”
“This is very relevant to any of these asset classes, including securities finance, where you’ve got this desktop environment with multiple applications,” he said. What the FDC3 Protocol will do is help streamline the workflow, save time, feed decision making and bring intelligence buried in different systems to the front at the point where it’s contextually relevant to help them make those decisions, Dar added.