Sell-Side Technology Awards 2020: Best Implementation at a Sell-Side Firm—OpenFin

For its latest foreign exchange (FX) single-dealer platform, Cortex LIVE, BNP Paribas leveraged OpenFin’s industry-specific operating system. The project was announced in September 2019, and the bank’s users now benefit from new data visualization techniques, workflow automation tools, and client integration capabilities, as well as Insight LIVE, a real-time market intelligence portal.

The project resulted in a build that involved a shift to HTML5, as well as a transformation of BNP’s FX trader workflow. Additionally, work included a user-experience upgrade that mainly focused on the provision of visualization tools and alerts, while a digital assistant, dubbed ALiX, was also added to help traders navigate the platform.

“The combination of Cortex LIVE and ALiX provides our clients with better execution capabilities as well as an unrivaled digital user experience,” says Chris Meehan, head of product management, e-commerce and digital at BNP Paribas. “Leveraging OpenFin to develop and deploy our platform has been pivotal in upgrading our technology stack, solving multiple workflow problems and ensuring our platform is future-proof.”

In the application interoperability world, OpenFin has made major inroads over the last three years. In addition to BNP Paribas, RBC, Barclays, FactSet, and other financial giants have turned to OpenFin’s operating system to improve productivity by making it easier to find relevant apps and content, reducing the number of clicks in the workflow ecosystem, and maximizing screen real estate by allowing both internal and external applications to “talk” to one another and share information, rather than the user having to toggle between screens and platforms.

Most recently, the vendor rolled out Platform API, which makes it easy for developers to create complex layouts across multiple apps with full customization of the look and feel of their windows and user experience. It also launched the FDC3 API, which implements the Finos FDC3 standard that OpenFin originally created and contributed to Finos. The standard is now backed by more than 50 sell-side and buy-side firms, and vendors.