Introducing OpenFin Cloud Services

Today we’re excited to introduce OpenFin Cloud Services. This new offering will provide to every bank, asset manager, hedge fund and wealth management firm an out-of-the-box, FDC3 – standard, private app store and workspace management solution, requiring zero development effort.

Pro Tip: It’s also available on premises with OpenFin On-Prem if you can’t use the cloud.

Those familiar with OpenFin know that we provide a web-based operating system — “iOS or Android for financial desktops”. Our OS has made phenomenal progress and now powers more than a thousand applications on 175,000 desktops across 1500 banks and buy-side firms. Until today, we’ve never provided an app store solution. It’s something that we have been thinking and talking about for years, but we wanted to make sure we did it at the right time, in the right way, and with a foundation of industry standards.

Timing, as they say, is everything. Across the industry, banks and buy-side firms today are focused on digital transformation and working to integrate internal and vendor apps into a common end user experience on the desktop (more about this here). Driving digital strategy at many firms is the “app store” concept. Once functionality is unbundled into discrete apps, there needs to be a place where organizations can curate and make discovery an intuitive experience for their employees. We heard from many of our customers, large and small, that this is infrastructure they would prefer not to build themselves and “can you give us something that just works?”

Equally important to us was the approach. At OpenFin, our commitment is to openness and neutrality. For that reason, we don’t mix being a platform provider with being a content creator. We’ve never put our brand between our customers and their end users or employees. The approach we’ve taken with Cloud Services stays true to that philosophy. We provide the technology, but it’s not Our app store; it’s Your app store. You decide what’s in your store, you set your branding, you decide who has access to what. We ensure the technology works and continuously enhance the offering in the same way we’ve been continuously enhancing OpenFin OS.

Industry standards are also critical to success. How can vendor apps live in different app stores and be discovered automatically without agreed upon underlying standards? An industry-wide “app directory” standard is a key component of the FDC3 standards initiative which OpenFin launched in 2017 and contributed to Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS) in May 2018. These standards are now close to finalization and they have already been incorporated into the new App Store cloud service we’re announcing today.

We’re thrilled to be entering this new chapter at OpenFin. You can find out more about OpenFin Cloud Services and request a demo here.

Please contact us at info@openfin.co if you have questions.