A new project contributed to the Fintech Open Source Foundation (Finos) seeks to build on the success of its most widely adopted project, the FDC3 standard, a set of codified specifications for writing APIs and for messaging that enables traders’ desktop applications to interoperate and share information.

The latest contribution, Electron FDC3, seeks to establish an open-source piece of code at the center of the standard—a “core” in developer lingo—that’s based on Electron, a free and open-source software framework maintained by the OpenJS Foundation, a sister to Finos as members of the Linux Foundation.

Since the standard’s conception nearly five years ago, end-users implementing FDC3 have relied primarily on three main proprietary vendors—OpenFin, which is not a member of Finos, Cosaic, and Glue42, both of which are Finos members—for these implementations. The new project will offer developers and adopters a neutral reference point and the full stack of FDC3 implementation, including a desktop agent, a locally installed container that exposes the API, in Electron and an application directory. Finos hopes the project will lead not only to increased adoption by sell-side and buy-side firms, but participation and interaction from engineers and web developers in and outside of finance.

“Buy side and sell side want to collaborate more often and more directly. We have a standard that allows that—but having an actual piece of code that supports that standard and allows a faster adoption of [it] seems in the best interest of the industry,” says Gabriele Columbro, Finos’s executive director.

The new project was conceived and contributed to Finos by Nicholas Kolba, a co-founder of the FDC3 standard, former chair of the FDC3 working group, and the current global head of product engineering at Dun & Bradstreet. Kolba says that having an Electron core within FDC3 will allow for developers to test and trial their applications inside the container without needing to employ a vendor’s services.

Despite the potential limits the project may bring to the vendors’ roles as desktop agents, he thinks they also may find an increased ability to build more tools and services—such as workspace management, windowing, and native integrations—on top of and around the open-source FDC3 ecosystem.

“This allows both vendors and applications owners to participate in open source in a way they couldn’t before,” Kolba says. “What we’re expecting to see is a lot more engagement around this than we’ve been able to get in the standards group. We’re speaking with some of the major vendors in the financial content space, and they see this as a positive development because it allows them to enter this space and participate without having to align around a proprietary vendor that’s going to ship their applications.”

At least one of the three main interop vendors, Cosaic—which in October contributed to Finos the FDC3 Workbench project, which helps developers test and debug their apps and ensure FDC3 compliance—has come out in support of Electron FDC3. In a written response to Kolba’s submission, Kris West, co-chair of the FDC3 working group at Finos and principal engineer at Cosaic, said that he believes the project will help not only with adoption of the standard itself, but with other projects such as the FDC3 conformance testing framework, another Finos project contributed by Scott Logic that will also enable adopters to test their FDC3 implementations.

When all these projects are added together, the industry gets an open-source toolkit to help participants understand, implement, validate, and debug their implementations—which is a “really important part of the story,” says Dan Schleifer, Cosaic’s co-founder and CEO.

“I don’t think it undercuts us at all. Being an FDC3 desktop is a very small part of what Finsemble [Cosaic’s smart desktop offering] does, and there will always be things beyond that which we and our competitors innovate on and build,” Schleifer says. “FDC3 is baseline interoperability, and it should be an open standard. You shouldn’t have to buy my product or anybody else’s to do basic FDC3 work.”

The vendors provide users with the bells and whistles, Schleifer contends. Cosaic Finsemble offers a complex workflow engine, workspace management, a custom-built UI and UX, authentication services, and development tools, in addition to Cosaic’s separate charting and data visualization business line, ChartIQ.

As the number of project contributions, particularly by end-user firms, to Finos has grown over the past year, so, too, has the foundation’s membership. Columbro says that in 2021, Finos added 19 members to its roster—a 34% increase—and has gained five more so far in 2022. Other big-name contributions include Goldman Sachs’s Legend, an open-source data management and government platform based on the bank’s internally developed data modeling language Pure, and JP Morgan’s Perspective, an open-source data visualization engine that has racked up more than 4,000 stars on GitHub—an achievement Columbro describes as having reached the “Nirvana” of attractive global open-source projects.

“The reality is it’s true—I’m an open-source guy, and I know how open-source projects can exponentially take off more easily than a standard. A standard is a very powerful, but relatively bureaucratic, way of building consensus. I would think that especially when there is a new project coming from an individual contributor, hosted from the get-go in a neutral foundation like us, that may have the potential to attract a different audience, which is the developers themselves,” he says.

While FDC3 may never quite reach the level of popularity that Perspective enjoys, the latest project invites the wider Electron community into the financial realm and opens the door for cross-collaboration and outside-the-box problem-solving. The wider world of Electron is massive, with most modern desktop applications across industries running on top of it, such as Microsoft Teams and Slack.

“We thoroughly hope to start the conversation with our friends at the OpenJS Foundation and the Electron maintainers to understand what of [our work at Finos] should actually be in the main Electron project. What of these requirements are generic enough and desirable enough, from an open-source standpoint, to be upstreamed?” Columbro says.