From Knowledge to Action: OpenFin Notification Center Fuels Productivity Across the Desktop

Today’s financial desktop users have more tools at their fingertips and are pulled in more directions than ever before. Like most other operating systems, OpenFin offers a mechanism to track the alerts that applications may generate throughout the trading day. But unlike other operating systems, OpenFin Notification Center is purpose-built for the financial desktop, empowering capital market professionals through dynamic features that enhance productivity and ease workflows.

This functionality took centerstage on our webinar hosted in partnership with Fidelity, “Centralizing Notifications Across the Workspace.”  We demonstrated several different kinds of alerts, including block trade notifications, market data insights, post-trade notifications and internal HR notifications. Then we sat down with Ganesh Iyengar, Squad Lead at Fidelity, where he focuses on asset management technology, equity trading and desktop user experience.

Screen Real Estate

In our discussion, Iyengar identified a fundamental tension on the modern financial desktop –screen real estate is at a premium, necessitating an integrated experience with unified workflows. Notifications can help make this a reality, but they also have the potential to create information overload, with users forced to sift through long lists of alerts just to identify their next task.

Prioritized & Actionable Alerts

OpenFin Notification Center creates a balance between these considerations. Our alerts are actionable and update in real time, enabling users to complete associated tasks within individual notifications, and without switching contexts. At the same time, our robust prioritization and customization capabilities means the most important notifications go right to the top, essentially creating a productivity roadmap.

The result is a user-base with an up-to-the-minute understanding of what they need to do and a streamlined path to doing it. Compare that with a conventional notification center that simply surfaces information to users in an unorganized manner, and the value of our approach becomes clear.

Workflow Diversity

OpenFin Notification Center’s configurable nature means it can serve as a truly comprehensive solution across the enterprise. Not all users leverage the same tools, and different users may leverage the same tools in different ways. Even users with the same title may have different clients, focus areas and the like. This workflow diversity calls for a system that can accommodate multiple personas and business lines, with specific notifications and views for each one. Time-of-day-based notifications are another important consideration, especially for global organizations. OpenFin is  built for all these use cases and more.

Our conversation with Iyengar centered around these themes and touched on some of the exciting work he is leading at Fidelity. Other topics of discussion included:

• The importance of interoperability and context sharing across different apps, including as a foundation for Notification Center
• The value of custom notification templates to help users navigate highly specific workflows without reinventing the wheel each time
• The importance of notifications amid the emerging future of work, including in new contexts, such as mobile

We hope you enjoy the discussion and come away with a better understanding of how feature-rich tools like Notification Center can foster efficiency and improve experiences across the financial desktop. Have any questions or think the Notification Center can benefit your team/workplace? Give us a shout at info@openfin.co.