How to deliver Big Power in a Little Package – Widgets

Over the last few years, you may have noticed a trend: services are moving from an all-things-to-all-people model (think Microsoft Office or bundled satellite/cable) to something more bespoke, specialised and economical (Google Docs and streaming shows). Consumers both private and corporate are opting for greater flexibility, customisation and choice.

In fintech, widgets are the latest iteration of this evolving movement. Perhaps once thought of as ‘components’ or ‘features’ of much larger systems, widgets are individual apps with specific (often deep) functionality. Integrated into robust, nimble interfaces using the OpenFin framework, they represent a powerful step forward in the march to modernise fintech services and deliver a new experience to end users.

Unconstraining Supply
When vendors bundle services into subscription packages, it artificially restricts the newest and most useful functionality from thriving. By contrast, decoupled widgets enable the deployment of best of breed with ease. Picking and choosing capabilities leads to better, leaner, more efficient software and solutions. Select the best news app. Take a charting widget with 3D visualisation tools. Find the chat software that fits your workflow. Add components, remove what’s unnecessary. A new generation of fintech companies are developing new products, disrupting the status quo and creating unprecedented accessibility to new technology – take advantage of it.

Reimagining Business Processes
In the high-stakes moment-to-moment world of finance, seconds count. That’s why streamlining workflow is such a crucial imperative. For widgets, hyper-specialised capabilities are only the beginning. By virtue of their modularity, they can be built into automated, integrated systems using a platform like OpenFin that utilises application interoperability to eliminate friction from the work process. Barriers between apps sharing data in real time, workflow impediments to order executions, and even simple but time-consuming tasks like cutting-and-pasting can be eliminated altogether, freeing your clients to focus on the big picture over niggling details. (And perhaps solving some desktop real estate issues in the process.)

Creating New Value Propositions
Empowered by interoperability, you can breathe new life into your existing applications. Enrich the functionality of your products’ workflow, refreshing them with greater power at minimal cost. Drive engagement to new levels. Strike new partnerships and strategic relationships. Instead of conforming to someone else’s ecosystem, you can innovate your own. The flexibility and interoperability engendered by widgets reveal a myriad of promising opportunities.

Generating Hyper-scale
When you connect your applications to others, you’re forging a network of the like-minded and yet appealing to a broader audience because you’re part of a big new value chain. Along with those new connections come collaboration, innovation, and a whole array of associated – and expansive – possibilities. Expansion begets expansion: exponential user growth, integrated audiences and new adherents are part and parcel of the process. Connection creates networks, and good networks create hyper-scale.

Undistorting Demand
The wide-open widget ecosystem empowers clients to free themselves from the harness of bloat and unneeded functionality, removing distortion in the marketplace around what clients and users are actually looking for. Unbundled applications enables the best products to excel to their rightful spot in the marketplace, in turn exposing new demand and pinpointing areas where investment and development can bear fruit. Increased competition leads to innovation, better products and an improved array of widgets for an evolving client-driven marketplace.

Making New Markets
Unbundle it and they will come – widgets unlock populations of untapped users. Componentised apps fundamentally change the metrics of cost and adoption, reducing or removing barriers to buy-in, generating new users and making new markets. It’s a new era in fintech – and this is only the beginning!