AFTAs 2020: Most Innovative Third-Party Technology Vendor (Infrastructure, Outsourcing and Development)—OpenFin

Historically, delivering an application to a financial desktop required separate security reviews and discrete software packaging for each financial institution, but over the last couple of years, open source technology has blown those doors off their hinges. This year desktop interoperability provider OpenFin has picked up the award for most innovative third-party technology vendor for its workflow transformation. In 2019, Behavox claimed the title, and Sentieo before that.

OpenFin CEO Mazy Dar says the average person should think about interop in the same way they would use a smartphone. “Everyone stares at their phones, and they say—well, this is delightful, it’s easy to use, it’s intuitive, and the apps work together,” Dar says. OpenFin OS allows interoperability between desktop applications so that each app can integrate with one system as opposed to bespoke integrations that the applications would have to make with each other.

He says a simple example would be opening the Calendar app on an iPhone and tapping the address for an appointment. The phone can bring up a street view within Google Maps (although these days it might bring up Zoom instead). The Calendar app does not have to send a signal to Google’s app because iOS does it automatically. “When people think of the financial desktop, its almost the opposite experience in every way,” Dar says. 

Applications built on OpenFin OS can share information, context and intent in a permissioned manner. Many of the deployment obstacles are removed, and application interoperability comes as standard, allowing firms to use legacy systems and new applications together.

Over 1,200 applications are available via OpenFin, and the OS is live on over 225,000 desktops of 1,500 clients in more than 60 countries around the globe. Over the past year, the firm has unveiled partnerships with FactSet, BNP Paribas, AllianceBernstein, Axioma, and FlexTrade, in addition to several more.