FDC3 Use Cases Roundtable at FINOS member meetings in London (October 4th) and New York (November 9th)

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FDC3 Use Cases Roundtable at FINOS member meetings 2021

Call to Action for FINOS members

If you are a FINOS member, join the RBC team in London on October 4th, or the Citi team in New York on November 9th for an FDC3 use cases discussion.

The FINOS Member Meeting is a FINOS Member-only event and free to FINOS Member employees Please email ossf@finos.org to request the FINOS member access code.

If you already have your member code, register for the FINOS members meeting in: London, October 4th and/or New York, November 9th.

Call to Action for non-members (and for FINOS members unable to attend in-person)

If there are any particular topics or use cases you would like to submit for discussion or consideration, please comment on this GitHub issue and we will provide an update in this GitHub issue after the October 4th and November 9th roundtables.

FDC3 Use Cases Roundtable - New York, November 9th

Topics

Citi will be leading a use cases roundtable discussion and will be sharing their experience with using the FDC3 standards for interoperability.

Takeaways

1. FDC3 and the AppD. Participants emphasized how useful FDC3 has been within their firms, particularly regarding ease of adoption within the organisation. Specifically the AppD was highlighted as a key building block for adoption.

2. Container Fragmentation

• Willingness from the community to open source internally developed context types into FINOS, especially as they start to interoperate with external applications, however there’s still a container fragmentation issue
• Participants agreed on the need to build translators to enable buy side - sell side connectivity. There are solutions for internal connectivity, but for external connectivity, we need to be able to find efficient solutions that do not require uplifting the whole platform
• Buy-side interacts with the entire street and every bank has a portal that their traders need to log into. It's very inefficient for their traders to have to log into multiple portals and swivel across the different portals. They need both authentication and context sharing across the portals they are interacting with
• Possible solutions:
  • Federated directories: in earlier FDC3 versions, directories would federate. An app lived in a directory and you could connect from that directory to other containers. Whatever directory you connected to, could itself connect to other directories.
  • Support the production of Desktop Agent Bridging · Issue #453 · finos/FDC3
• Requirements:
  • many-to-many (containers) integration
  • efficient authentication
  • Standard protocols (which security identifier you’re going to use etc.)

3. “FIX for the buyside”

• interop / workflows don’t only involve the desktop but also other parts of the stack. What role can or should FDC3 play there? How far should it extend beyond the desktop?
• why would you use FDC3 instead of FIX? Where should FDC3 stop and where should FIX take over? Vision for a “FIX for the buyside” (FIX is primarily peer to peer and comprehensive, whereas FDC3 is all about loose coupling. They approach things from different perspectives. Both are used for workflows, or to transition from one point to another. FDC3 is stateless as opposed to FIX which manages state.
• Should intents be able to pass data?

4. Identifiers

• Conversation around identifiers and how to pass identifiers around different applications. OpenFIGI was mentioned as a potential solution to investigate but consensus was that is used more for social media
• Enforcing identifiers will be difficult in some use cases as a lot of times there isn't a defined identifier, ie content from an analyst or in some pre-trade workflows there might yet yet be an identifier created

5. Context Data & Intents

• Continue conversation at Dec 2nd Context Data & Intents Meeting
• connect with Financial Objects SIG (email fo@finos.org or raise an issue at https://github.com/finos/financial-objects/issues )

Next steps & call to action

• Continue conversation at Dec 2nd Context Data & Intents Meeting
• connect with Financial Objects SIG (email fo@finos.org or raise an issue at https://github.com/finos/financial-objects/issues )

FDC3 Use Cases Roundtable - London, October 5th

Topics

RBC will provide a quick overview of their experience so far using the FDC3 standards for interoperability at RBC, followed by a roundtable discussion on how we can collectively enhance the existing standard to provide a richer language for inter application communication on the desktop.

Takeaways

• RBC provided an outline of work they've done with FDC3 on Springboard: Desktop app launcher and interop environment: global search, and risk case studies

• The FDC3 lexicon needs to be expanded, both with addition intents and context types to support Use Cases, but also to include more primitive data types in order to construct complex types. It was also noted that 'Context data' is not always enough, Applications also need to share state.

• Examples: Use Cases in need of context types and intents. (A number of participants agreed that now is an appropriate time to expand the Lexicon)

  • Global Search: Perform search; Broadcast contexts from the results
  • View Risk
  • ViewRiskSensitivity
  • ViewOrganisation (context avail not intent)
  • Notifications: Notification context; Action buttons (intents)
  • CreateQuote
  • Retrieve a list of current real time conversations (and associated contexts): ExecutionWorkspace

• Other Use Cases that should be addressed:

  • Cross-container communication of context
  • Conversion or augmentation of context types encountered:
    • Via Intents raised, e.g. transform Quotes or Orders
    • Context broadcasts on their way through the Desktop Agent

Next steps & call to action: Identify, contribute and model context types

1. Identify --> FINOS can facilitate community context type discussion groups to discuss proposals
2. Contribute --> contribute community context types at Community usage of channels, intents and context types #317
3. Model --> email help@finos.org requesting the setup of a Legend Studio project to model context types