The Smart Desktop: An Integrated Blend of Old and New

This article was updated in March 2026 to reflect how smart desktop platforms are evolving to support both end users and the engineers building interoperable platforms.

With the “Smart Desktop” coming to the forefront in capital markets, client firms and the press are focusing more and more on interoperability solutions like io.Connect and other offerings, such as OpenFin. That’s a good thing, of course — a rising tide lifts all ships — and we think the category has much to offer the industry. That said, I’m starting to notice commentary about how smart desktop technology is out to destroy incumbents to make room for itself, which is fundamentally at odds with our perspective.

Because the value of a smart desktop isn’t just what it enables for the end user, but also what it enables for the teams responsible for building and evolving the platform behind it.

First off, what is a Smart Desktop?

To us, a Smart Desktop means all the applications you use work seamlessly together. Pretty simple, right?

Think about your desktop now — a dozen browser tabs open with applications that don’t communicate, your core market data terminal and OMS/EMS platform launched separately, and a handful of in-house or niche desktop applications floating around the edges. That’s a chaotic, fragmented, inefficient desktop. Smart Desktop technology brings these all together — in-house and third party, native and HTML5 — and lets you control how they share information and work together.

What’s often overlooked is that this shift isn’t only about improving the user experience. It also fundamentally changes how integration is approached behind the scenes, replacing an ever-growing set of point-to-point connections with a shared layer through which applications can participate in workflows without needing to be tightly coupled to one another.

Work with—not against—incumbents

The traditional narrative is that every innovative upstart wants to disrupt the industry and kill off the incumbents, but a philosophical difference at interop.io stops us from making that our mission. We believe replacing a monolith with a newer monolith doesn’t change anything — it simply shifts the power and the cost elsewhere.

Instead, interoperability allows existing platforms like the Bloomberg Terminal, Eikon, and others to become more valuable by exposing and extending their capabilities into broader workflows. By leveraging APIs such as Bloomberg’s Terminal Connect, these systems can participate alongside other applications rather than existing in isolation.

This approach also reflects a more practical reality for engineering teams, who are rarely in a position to replace core systems outright. Being able to extend, connect, and gradually evolve what already exists is often far more valuable than attempting to start from scratch.

The difference between a good app and a great app

The difference between a good app and a great app is how well it works with others. Applications that exist in silos don’t benefit the end user, and they don’t benefit the platform either, because every new integration becomes a one-off effort that needs to be built, tested, and maintained over time.

Interoperability, particularly through standards like FDC3, changes that dynamic by allowing applications to share context and participate in workflows in a consistent way. This not only improves the experience for users, but also introduces a level of standardization that reduces the burden on engineering teams, who can focus less on rebuilding integration infrastructure and more on delivering new capabilities.

Bloomberg joins the Smart Desktop revolution

Bloomberg has been diversifying third-party apps available via its Bloomberg App Portal since 2012. Users benefit, and appreciate, having access to a library of financial tools, and if those tools can interoperate, that’s even better. In this A-Team Insight article, Mike King, global business head for the Bloomberg App Portal, said “Interoperability is now becoming not just nice to have, but a must have.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

If you’re a vendor building an application or component, interoperability is an opportunity, not a threat. If you let your customers integrate your software with the other software of their choosing — in ways you can’t predict — they’ll get more value out of it, and it will become more deeply embedded in their workflows as a result. You don’t need to be all things to all users; in fact, you can stop building the features around the edge of your product that simply check a box, and instead focus on your core differentiators.

Take control and create your own Smart Desktop

Giving firms and their users the choice to pick whichever applications they want, feel empowered by new technology, and build applications in whatever technology suits them is our goal. The future of the desktop is firms and their users assembling workspaces in ways vendors can’t imagine.

At the same time, this flexibility creates a different kind of advantage for the teams behind the platform, who can introduce new applications, evolve existing ones, and incorporate new capabilities — including AI — without constantly reworking how everything connects.

Back in the 1990s, BASF used the tagline: “We don’t make the products you buy, we make the products you buy better.” That’s the way I think of interop.io: we don’t make the apps you buy, we make the apps you buy better.