1st July 2021
What can FDC3 offer – an interview with Matt Barrett, Adaptive CEO and co-founder
FINOS recently announced the release of version 1.2 of the FDC3 standards and invited business and technology leaders driving the standards to share how FDC3 improves interoperability on the financial desktop to a webinar discussion panel. Adaptive is a technology provider that focuses on the front office of capital markets, and a lot of our clients are FINOS members. We build solutions for our clients using open source codes to deliver their business changes quicker. We don’t particularly like writing codes that already exist out there and open source is a fantastic way for us to minimise the amount of re-work that we have to do for our clients.
FDC3 is all about interoperability. In a number of different areas, there are opportunities to unlock new revenue and cost savings for businesses operating in the capital markets. In this interview, Matt talks about ideas he shared during the webinar around the business value that FDC3 brings to clients in the capital markets.
How would FDC3 go about creating new revenue opportunities?
Cost of experimentation
The cost of experimentation in technology within capital markets can be very high. And, generating new revenue in mature markets, like capital markets, is all about experimentation. We know that there is a huge amount of existing technology already built, some of it legacy, some of it relatively new and amenable to change. But regardless, the cost remains high and FDC3 enables us to reduce the cost of experimentation when building new business capability that can be a new source of revenue for our clients.
Scheduling cross-team releases
Globally coordinated releases of software across a number of different teams within an investment bank is not economically viable; the scheduling overhead of getting all of those teams to release a new version of their framework’s libraries, user interfaces, and backend infrastructure is extremely high. FDC3 allows us to break down components and enables different teams to deliver together without significant overhead.
And by delivering together more easily, functionality that spans different teams, that would have previously been prohibitively expensive, can now be delivered into production more efficiently. You can experiment with new capabilities to serve your customers, and enable additional sources of revenue.
How would FDC3 facilitate cost reduction?
UI technology changes rapidly
Monolithic application development doesn’t work anymore. Firms need to build micro front ends to enable piecemeal and modular replacement of those front ends. The reason is that UI technology changes rapidly and that refreshing your UI technology is going to be a constant requirement. In order to address this, you need to write pieces of functionality that are smaller and able to stick together more easily. FDC3 can be the glue that enables this.
Network effects
One other big driver for this is network effects. Firms have made huge investments in isolated or monolithic functionality over the last 20 years that can still add value to their clients. Unlocking and repackaging that functionality is a fantastic benefit of FDC3. You can create a hugely powerful desktop ecosystem by making use of all that existing investment.
All of those parts of capability and functionality that are at the moment locked up within thick client or siloed web applications can now be broken apart enough that people start using them to stitch together their own workflows and unlock a huge amount of business value from what you have already built and invested in.
How do you get started with FDC3?
One of the things we do with our clients is helping them get started so, perhaps, talking to us would be the best start. Our engagement models are based on years of experience delivering complex solutions in close partnership with our clients; capital and commodity market participants that value differentiation through technology.
Putting that aside, one of the huge benefits of FDC3 is that it solves the discussion problem. Desktop interop, as a very broad topic, enables interested parties to spend a lot of time discussing things that have many reasonable interpretations, and one of the fantastic things about FDC3 is that it provides an answer to all of those questions – it’s that way because FDC3 says so.
Therefore, the first thing you may want to do is to look into FDC3 so you understand how it provides answers to a lot of questions you are going to have when you start. At the end of this blog post, you will find other helpful articles for you.
The next step is to pick a workflow that spans components within a team, or even better components across multiple teams. Defining the parts of the workflow you wish to create, using FDC3 as your guide, is a great way to get started.
If you would like to have a chat with us and find out how we can help you with your next project, reach out.
Matt Barrett
CEO and co-founder,
Adaptive Financial Consulting
If you would like to hear how my fellow panel participants demonstrated their products to illustrate their approach to FDC3, the full recording is here.