FINOS Announces New FDC3 2.0 Conformance Program and New FDC3 Certified Desktop Agents

FDC3 is now widely adopted as a cross-industry interoperability standard and it's experiencing a major investment from the ecosystem at large

LONDON, UK / ACCESSWIRE / June 15, 2023 / The Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), the financial services umbrella of the Linux Foundation, today announced during its Member Meeting in London the general availability of the FDC3 2.0 Conformance Program and the new class of FDC3-compatible Desktop Agents, bringing the total to nine software products across FDC3 1.2 and 2.0.

The FDC3 1.2 Conformance Program, completely open source and developed with the support of Scott Logic, was originally announced together with the first FDC3 1.2 certified desktop agents interop.io (formerly Finsemble and Tick 42's Glue42 Enterprise, which merged earlier this month) and FINOS' own open source FDC3 Sail in December 2022.

Announced today are three further FDC3 1.2 certified desktop agents, Connectifi and OpenFin, as well as the first FDC3 2.0-compatible certifications for interop.io.

The full list of adopters and FDC3 Certified Desktop Agents can be found here and anyone can apply for certification here.

Strength to Strength

The announcement comes as the global FDC3 usage is accelerating as a truly open protocol for cross-firm interoperability, across application and container vendors, a large internal and external adoption from sell-side firms, and a growing participation from buy-side firms.

Adopters are increasingly keen to show their support for the standard as shown in the FDC3 Community and nowhere has this been more apparent than at the recent FINOS Interoperability & RegTech hackathon in New York, which brought together almost 100 participants globally. During this event, seven out of the 11 produced open source projects were related to FDC3, including three of the top five winners.

Last but not least, this announcement follows a recent spike of venture investments and M&A activity in the FDC3 ecosystem, which is poised to accelerate adoption and contribution even further. Connectifi (FDC3 1.2 Certified) announced last week its Seed funding round to bring the FDC3 standard to the cloud, OpenFin (FDC3 1.2 Certified) received $35M in Series D funding, and lastly two of the leading interoperability vendors Finsemble and Glue42 (FDC3 1.2 and 2.0 certified) recently announced their merger into interop.io.

Why FDC3 Conformance Is Important

FDC3 (Financial Desktop Connectivity and Collaboration Consortium) compatible Desktop Agents are crucial due to their role in facilitating seamless interoperability between finance-related applications on a desktop and across the firewall, allowing its users to manage information overload (traders often have multiple different screens) and work faster by standardizing a way to exchange data between applications (avoid copy-pasting and mis-keying errors). FDC3 provides a way to integrate different vendors, programming languages, platforms and release-schedules, and replaces the frequent finance problem of bilateral agreements between applications with common standards for key pieces of financial context data.

Previously, writing apps for FDC3 that work across all desktop agents has been difficult, with different vendors having subtly different approaches to implementing the FDC3 standard. The FDC3 Conformance Project was designed to change that, and provides a standardized set of tests that all certified desktop agents must pass.

"As FDC3 is used in more and more mission critical context to connect production workflows across sell-side and buy-side, it became clear that FINOS had a fundamental role to play to assure consumers a neutral verification of compatibility to the standard," said Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director of FINOS and General Manager of The Linux Foundation Europe. "By providing a fully open source, maintainers-blessed way to certify vendor products against the open standard, we will remove a fundamental friction for adopters providing them with the peace of mind of a truly "write once, run everywhere" approach for their applications."

Thanks to the contributions of longstanding contributor and FINOS Silver Member Scott Logic and through the efforts of the FDC3 community, FINOS now has a full open source test suite for vendors to transparently self-assess compatibility with both FDC3 1.2 and 2.0.

"As more and more financial organizations use common open source tools, it's vital that there are well-defined standards in place to support interoperability," said Colin Eberhardt, Chief Technology Officer of Scott Logic. "With our extensive experience in FDC3, Scott Logic was ideally placed to lead the development of the FDC3 Conformance Framework. Our engineers worked closely with the working group, maintainers and commercial vendors to create an extensive suite of automation tests."

After self-assessment, all platforms offering FDC3 compatible interfaces are highly recommended to undertake the formal certification process to be listed as an official FDC3 Certified Desktop Agent. In order to foster standard adoption, the certification is currently free-of-charge until October 2023.

Community Reaction

"Symphony believes the future is about open, secure networks. Desktop interoperability and standardization are critical to this future," said Brad Levy, CEO of Symphony. "By ensuring proper certification and conformance testing of the FDC3 standard, FINOS can enable widespread, uniform adoption for strengthened desktop interoperability and standardization - a critical area for this future."

"We're thrilled to bring together Glue42 and Finsemble to become interop.io, a new brand with a

continued focus on interoperability and commitment to FDC3 and FDC3 workflows," said interop.io CEO Leslie Spiro. "The Conformance Program and our certification will continue to be

prioritized as we take on new clients and interoperability projects with our clients."

"FINOS conformance testing and certification for FDC3 is a critical function that only an institution like FINOS can provide," said Nick Kolba, Co-Creator of FDC3 and CEO of Connectifi. "Especially as providers move into new patterns of delivering FDC3, the conformance tests have provided an essential North Star for keeping the standard and the developer experience consistent."

What to look forward to

In addition to the upcoming FDC3 2.1 version of the standard, coming later in the year will be two new training courses (updated for FDC3 2.0) to replace Linux Foundation's FDC3 1.2 training course, as well as a new FDC3 Practitioner Certification to be added to the Linux Foundation's vendor-neutral certification catalog.

If you would like any further information about how to get involved with FDC3, please reach out to the FDC3 Community at fdc3@finos.org.

About FINOS

FINOS (The Fintech Open Source Foundation) is a nonprofit whose mission is to foster adoption of open source, open standards and collaborative software development practices in financial services. It is the center for open source developers and the financial services industry to build new technology projects that have a lasting impact on business operations. As a regulatory compliant platform, the foundation enables developers from these competing organizations to collaborate on projects with a strong propensity for mutualization. It has enabled codebase contributions from both the buy- and sell-side firms and counts over 50 major financial institutions, fintechs and technology consultancies as part of its membership. FINOS is also part of the Linux Foundation, the largest shared technology organization in the world.

Media Contact

Catharine Rybeck
Caliber Corporate Advisers for FINOS
catharine@calibercorporate.com

SOURCE: FINOS