OpenFin Builds Out Notification Center

OpenFin is adding a notification center to its financial desktop operating system after noticing that many of its customers were building their own components on top of the platform. 

“More than a couple of years ago now, we saw a number of our customers building the things they needed, and they were kind of similar capabilities. One example of that was notification centers,” says Mazy Dar, CEO of OpenFin.

A Mac or Windows 10 operating system already contains notification functionality that sends alerts to users. But the notification centers on these native operating systems often lack what customers in the capital markets need, as they aren’t designed for specific use cases such as trading or compliance workflows, and so these customers of OpenFin’s had started building their own.   

Dar says OpenFin has so far been “invisible” to end-users. “The way the software works is it runs on the desktop, and people build their apps on top. They use APIs that our software exposes, but all the end-user sees is the app from whoever built the app, whether it’s a bank, an asset manager, or a vendor,” he says.

While OpenFin’s notification center renders the firm’s software more visible, in that users will interact with the notifications, they can act on a notification without having to launch the app that needs attention. 

“You want [a notification center] to not just inform the end-user. You want the user to be able to action it, click on the notification, or, better yet, instead of clicking on it and having it open up the app that you want, what if you can action the notification right there? For example, [a notification that says] this trade just got booked in the system with these details. And there’s a button for you to approve, so you don’t have to go into another application,” Dar says.

Digital transformation in enterprises can mean many things to different people and firms, but it’s almost always about improving productivity, he adds. A few tools can be foundational to delivering that, which is what the notification center is intended to be.

Rules and Permissions

Not all notifications are created equal, however. To prevent users from being bombarded with messages, OpenFin separates notification rules and permissions into three buckets: the provider of the notification, the end-user receiving the notification, and the employer of the firm where the end-user works.

The notification provider decides to whom the notification should be sent, and can assign a level of priority associated with it.

For example, Dar says, if it’s a notification of a trade event or a trade break, that would be considered higher priority. “If it’s news, that’s a lower priority,” he adds.

The end-user can then decide which vendors they want to get notifications from, similar to turning notifications on or off from applications on a mobile device. “Now, there’s governance in that, because if you’re the kind of app that’s spamming your end-user with lots of notifications, they’re just going to turn it off, right?” Dar says.

So the onus is on vendors to figure out the right cadence for generating notifications. The employer can also decide which vendors can send notifications to their employees.

“They can say, ‘Look, we either know this vendor, or we don’t know them. We’re happy for this vendor to be generating notifications and sending them to our employees, or not.’ It’s not like email, where literally anybody could send one to you, and you’re hoping your spam filter will block it. This is notifications coming from trusted vendors, approved by your employer, where if you don’t like them, you can turn them off.”

OpenFin has gone a step further and enabled end-users to decide whether they want a notification to be dismissed explicitly, or if they want it to come up temporarily and then go away.

“What if you’ve walked away from your desk for a couple of hours, and then you come back, and you have 100 notifications? You need ways to categorize those visually and make it easy for an end-user to flip through them and also dismiss them,” Dar says.

Building a notification center is complex. For example, vendors running an app at a bank have to figure out how to integrate it into that particular bank’s notification center. Multiply that by the number of banks that vendors provide services to, and it could become an onerous undertaking.

Also, providing a visual component for every notification—perhaps hundreds of notifications, if not more—will result in a large memory footprint on users’ desktops.

“It’s not the normal kind of user interface problem you might have—to make it look good and make it functional. There’s actually a hard technical problem to solve here. And unless you solve it, you could create a memory problem for a user whose desktop might be crashing as all this important stuff is happening,” he says.

Instead, Dar says virtualization can help to generate visual components only as a user scrolls through the notifications.

“Because these are important building blocks, and they’re foundational, we feel like we need to provide these things by default with OpenFin to enable the kind of next-generation experience that people are looking for,” he says.

Dar says the notification center, which OpenFin has been working on for more than a year, is in live production with a “major” bank and asset manager. The company expects to obtain additional feedback as more banks, asset managers, and vendors start using it.

OpenFin is also working on an app launcher that will work similarly to the Dock on a Mac, or the Windows Start menu.

“If you use a Mac, there’s the Dock component that is the sidebar or bottom bar that’s right there on the desktop. Well, that doesn’t work for most banks, because there are only so many apps you can fit on a Dock-type component. A typical end-user at a bank might be using 20, 40, or 50 apps, some of them very occasionally. So you want a more sophisticated way of finding an app when you need it. We’re seeing the same pattern, where lots of banks are looking for simple app discovery and a great visual component to make that really easy,” he says.

OpenFin will make the first version of the app launcher available to beta customers this month.  

Dar adds that the firm will continue building “standard components” such as the notification center, app launcher, and other familiar operating system elements, so that customers don’t have to build them themselves.  

Last year was a defining moment for the app interoperability movement, and that trend is set to continue into 2021 and beyond. Even in capital markets, where firms are slower to adopt the cloud, it seems the big workstation’s days are numbered. While approaches to interoperability differ, many firms are opting to outsource the heavy lifting of containerization to vendors such as OpenFin, Cosaic and Glue42.