ChartIQ's Finsemble Adds Support for Electron Open-Source Tech

Charlottesville, VA-based desktop analytics provider ChartIQ has integrated Electron, an open-source web container for writing cross-platform desktop applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, into its Finsemble desktop integration platform, to create a cohesive user experience that’s faster, cheaper and more secure than other terminals.

The idea, says ChartIQ co-founder and CEO Dan Schleifer, is to build a visually and logically integrated trading platform, while allowing users to customize their own blend of third-party applications that work in sync with one another.

“It’s not only about sharing context, but building workflows between different applications that were never intended to work together,” Schleifer says.

Electron, developed by GitHub, is deployed on more than 100 million desktops worldwide.

“If you’ve ever used Slack or Skype or Spotify…. Those are all applications that are wrapped in Electron,” Schleifer says. “Electron is the web container that allows us to do the same thing that all these things do, which is to take our application that’s built in web technology, bundle it with Chromium’s engine, and install it on the computer.”

Because it uses Chromium—the codebase behind the world’s most popular web browser, Google Chrome—as its underlying technology, Finsemble benefits from Chromium’s performance and security features, which include automatic updates and preventing vulnerabilities by firewalling untrusted content.

The added support for Electron allows financial firms to join a global community of developers that includes tech industry giants, such as Microsoft and GitHub. In addition, achieving the vendor’s goal of providing “an unparalleled desktop integration platform” becomes “easier with Electron under the hood,” Schleifer says, but adds that the company is also growing fast to support its goal.

“Since November of last year, we went from 35 to 55 people,” Schleifer says. “We’re probably looking to add about 30 to 35 more people throughout the rest of 2019. We’re expanding both both senior roles as well as sales, software development, marketing, and pretty much everything else.”