The Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), the financial services umbrella of the Linux Foundation, recently announced at Open Source in Finance Forum New York (OSFF NY) that BlackRock’s Aladdin platform and Morgan Stanley’s Open Source ComposeUI have achieved FDC3 2.0 Conformance. These platforms now join the growing list of FINOS FDC3 Certified Platforms.

Additionally, during OSFF NY opening keynotes, FINOS showcased public statements from leading financial data and analytics vendors like London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) and S&P Global Market Intelligence implementing the FDC3 protocol within customer-facing applications. These firms join the over 30 firms publicly listed as FDC3 standard users and the estimated thousands of internal applications built on the open standard.

FDC3 (Financial Desktop Connectivity and Collaboration Consortium) is an open standard hosted by FINOS created in 2018 to address desktop application interoperability in financial services and rapidly evolved into a recognized cross-industry connectivity standard.

“FDC3 has gained significant momentum, as evidenced by these new conformance and adoption results,” said Madeleine Dassule, Partner and CIO Infrastructure Platform at Wellington Management, Chair of the FINOS Governing Board and FDC3 Executive Sponsor. “And we’re very excited to see innovations such as FDC3 for the Web, and FDC3 Identity and Security, being driven by the open source community.”

“Having industry leaders like BlackRock and Morgan Stanley now certified by FINOS as FDC3 2.0 Conformant is a major milestone as it will no doubt exponentially grow the network effect FDC3 is already experiencing,” said Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director of FINOS. “Paired with adoption from leading financial data platforms, it’s hard to overstate what a watershed moment this is in breaking long-standing industry silos and vendor lock-in.”

A critical step forward in industry interoperability

The long-standing challenges and resource strain financial services have experienced with financial technology interoperability are now being addressed directly through a commitment to open standards.

For BlackRock, the certification process, led by Sitija Sarkar, Tech Fellow, Managing Director and FINOS Board member, ensures that third-party vendor applications adhering to the FDC3 standard can seamlessly interact with Aladdin applications, regardless of the provider. This interoperability is crucial for streamlining workflows and improving productivity.

For Morgan Stanley, Conformance demonstrates the strategic importance the firm places on FDC3. This year alone they have taken on co-maintainer responsibilities of the FDC3 standard and contributed .NET bindings, as well as contributing to FDC3 2.2. It’s important to note that the newly certified ComposeUI is itself an incubating Morgan Stanley open source project.

Morgan Stanley is actively engaged with a wide range of FINOS open source project communities alongside FDC3, including Common Cloud Controls, Open Source Readiness, AI Readiness, Architecture as Code, TraderX, BankerX, and Zenith.

Also at OSFF NY Morgan Stanley and Wellington Management demonstrated FDC3 cross-firm, highly confidential interoperability use cases, further broadening the reach and applicability of the standard.

FDC3 2.2 enables use cases beyond desktop, GenAI supercharges the standard

The FDC3 community has also unveiled the newly adopted FDC3 2.2 specification which will be demonstrated at OSFF NY. Importantly, this includes a protocol allowing FDC3 applications to work in browsers in a standards-compliant way. This is particularly exciting as it opens up the possibility for FDC3 to be used beyond its original remit of the trader desktop to tackle a broader variety of finance and other use cases.

In conjunction with its open source nature enabling training of large language models free of IP concerns, FDC3 is solidly set to enable a high productivity development of a new generation of financial workflows based on seamless standard-based connectivity across the industry.