Open standards for the financial desktop
What is FDC3?
FDC3 and FINOS
FDC3 (Financial Desktop Connectivity and Collaboration Consortium) provides universal connectivity and standards for all fintech apps. By use of this common language, FDC3 enables faster decision-making, improves productivity, and streamlines workflows through plug-and-play interoperability.
In October 2017, over twenty banks and capital markets solution providers joined together to create the FDC3 working group. Much like the ubiquitous Financial Information eXchange (FIX®) standard, the goal was to create vendor-neutral standards to achieve connectivity across desktop apps. To this day, FDC3 is maintained through the collaborative efforts of the FDC3 open-source community.
Since 2018, FDC3 has resided within FINOS—the Fintech Open Source Foundation.
The FDC3 community includes 40+ members, from platform providers to application vendors and buy- and sell-side firms. interop.io is an FDC3 champion and lead-maintainer. Together, we’re paving the future of interop across the financial desktop.
FDC3 2.0 is the first major revision to the standard since its original release. The recent additions help FDC3 adopters tackle new use-cases and improve on existing ones. With FDC3 2.0:
- FDC3 has evolved from context sharing and intents to supporting complex workflows with transactions and feeds
- New intents (actions) and context definitions support real-world workflows
- The new app directory standard enables vendors and firms to publish their apps to run on any desktop agent
- 2.0 includes a new and improved standards portal website
As a vendor in capital markets, interoperability is most likely top of mind as FINOS/FDC3 is supported by the biggest buy- and sell-side firms in the industry, along with leading solutions providers around the world.
In any multi-step workflow, there are actions and responses to actions. These actions are composed of data context and intents—the core of FDC3. An easy way to think about context is “nouns” such as ticker symbol. Intents can be thought of as an action, such as open a chart. In this post, we’ll break down two key specifications of FDC3 to give them a closer look.
FDC3 2.0 brings new life to the standard
FDC3 makes it’s clear that the standard is now a mainstay for workflows across financial desktops. Nearly every update to the standard came from the FDC3 community. In this blog post, see what’s new in FDC3 2.0, such as updates to FDC3 appD and new API transactions.
Read more about FDC3 2.0
FDC3 Desktop Agent API
The foundation of FDC3 is the desktop agent API (Application Programming Interface), which is a single interface that app developers can write to (whether it’s an in-house built app or vendor app) in order to add interoperability to the functionality. Think about the FDC3 API as an agreement between existing platforms and applications.
interop.io provides a high-quality solutions engineering service, ready to provide guidance on how best to integrate interoperability into your app and how best to leverage it within your smart desktop.
The landscape of application interconnectivity is evolving right before our eyes. In the background, is FDC3.
Advanced workflows with FDC3 and interop.io
The FDC3 specification is focused on context data, intents, and directory of apps that can handle context and intents. Passing a message (context data) and an action request (an intent) is certainly powerful, and enables synchronization of context (all of your apps updating at the same time) and launching an app with context. Real-world workflows like responding to an RFQ, handling a trade break, or doing pre-trade analysis require many more steps, dependencies between apps, and state management.
FDC3 is necessary, but not sufficient to enable these kinds of real-world use cases. As the standard evolves, it will continue to grow and support more complex workflows. But the reality for now is that extending beyond the standard is critical. As you look to build or buy a desktop interoperability platform, mapping out target workflows and identifying critical capabilities required to enable them is key.