FDC3 - Financial Desktop Connectivity and Collaboration Consortium

What Is It?

FDC3 is an open standard for applications on financial desktop to interoperate and exchange data with each other.

Users benefit from a more joined-up experience, which reduces the "friction" in getting common tasks done,
By enabling applications to:
- launch other apps (build a launcher),
- respond to activity in other apps (context sharing),
- request functionality from other apps (raising intents).

What Are The Benefits?

📇 Help Manage Information Overload

Finance is an information-dense environment.
Typically, traders will use serveral different displays so that they can keep track of multiple information sources at once. FDC3 helps with this by sharing the "context" between multiple applications, so that they collectively track the topic the user is focused on.

🏃‍♂️ Work Faster

FDC3 standardizes a way to call actions between applications (called "intents"). Applications can raise intents for other apps to resolve, extending each other's functionality. Instead of the user copy-and-pasting bits of data from one application to another, FDC3 makes sure the intents have the data they need to seamlessly transition activity between applications.

🖥️ Platform Agnostic

As an open standard, FDC3 can be implemented on any platform and in any language. All that is required is a "Desktop Agent" that implements the FDC3 standard, which is responsible for co-ordinating application interactions. (For a list of open source and proprietary desktop agents, see "Platform providers" here.) FDC3 is successfully running on Web and Native platforms in financial institutions around the world.

🔌 End the Integration Nightmare

By providing support for FDC3, vendors and financial organizations alike can avoid the bilateral or trilateral integration projects that plague desktop app roll-out, cause vendor lock-in and result in a slow pace of change on the Financial Services desktop.

👐 Open Standards Promote Innovation

FDC3 is developed collaboratively by a consortium of industry participants including banks, agent vendors, app developers and FinTech firms. By design, FDC3 is open to extension. We have an active community working on growing and improving the standard with new data and intents.

How Does It Work?

FDC3 includes a standardized API for a Desktop agent, an OpenAPI App Directory, standard verbs to invoke actions between applications (called "intents"), standard formats for data passed between applications (called "context data") and a wire-protocol for Desktop Agents to communicate with each other (called "Desktop Agent Bridging").

Hence, the standard currently consists of five parts:

The specifications are informed by agreed business use cases, and implemented and used by leading financial industry participants.

More Resources

See https://fdc3.finos.org for more information, including on Compliance and the FDC3 charter, as well as a comprehensive API Reference.
You can also take the free FDC3 Training for an introduction to FDC3's core concepts and usage.
The FDC3 Community Page Training Tab also contains a selection of online resources to browse.
FINOS' open source Desktop Agent, FDC3 Sail project written with Node / Electron.

Supported Platforms

As an open standard, FDC3 can be implemented on any platform and in any language.
All that is required is a "desktop agent" that supports the FDC3 standard, which is responsible for coordinating application interactions.
Get started using FDC3 on the web with TypeScript by reading the supported platforms page.

FDC3 Project Structure

This project (the FDC3 Standard repo) is now a monorepo containing the following modules:

| Directory | Release Coordinates | Purpose | Testing / Coverage | |--------------------------------------|--------------------------------------------------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|-----------------------| | packages/fdc3-schema | @finos/fdc3-schema (npm) | Contains the FDC3 For The Web and Desktop Agent Bridging protocol schemas. Generates BridgingTypes.ts and BrowserTypes.ts versions of those schemas for consumption in typescript code. | n/a | | packages/fdc3-context | @finos/fdc3-context (npm) | Contains the schemas for standard FDC3 context types. Generates the ContextTypes.ts typescript version of the schema for consumption in typescript/javascript. | n/a | | packages/fdc3-standard | @finos/fdc3-standard (npm) | Interface definitions for the FDC3 standard in typescript (e.g. the DesktopAgent interface) and the app directory schema. | Jest, embedded NYC | | packages/fdc3-agent-proxy | @finos/fdc3-agent-proxy (npm) | Contains a complete implementation of the FDC3 DACP. Written in a platform-agnostic manner. | Cucumber, NYC | | packages/fdc3-get-agent | @finos/fdc3-get-agent (npm) | Implements the getAgent and fdc3Ready() functions as well as the FDC3 Web Connection protocol to allow FDC3 to work on the web or in an electron container. | Cucumber, NYC | | packages/testing | -not released- | Contains testing tools used by the cucumber tests used within other modules of this project. | | | toolbox/fdc3-conformance | -not released- | Contains definitions of the FDC3 conformance test suite | Test Definitions Only | | toolbox/fdc3-workbench | here | Contains an FDC3-For-Web ready version of the FDC3 Workbench. | | | toolbox/fdc3-explained | Here | Readme Here | | | toolbox/fdc3-for-web/fdc3-web-impl | @finos/fdc3-web-impl (npm) | Portable and reusable impleme

FDC3

Install / Use

README