Numerix Deploys Oneview on OpenFin’s Operating System

The New York-based provider of risk management technology and services is currently running a beta program of the offering with selected clients and plans to have it in general availability within three months.

Steve O’Hanlon, CEO of Numerix, tells WatersTechnology that this will provide greater flexibility and customization for end-users so they can tailor the user experience (UX) to their specific needs.

“For the future, we will be able to deploy all of our capabilities through our platform in a unique way, rather than just a standard GUI,” he says. “It now offers limitless possibilities to the end-user to leverage the uniqueness of what we’re doing at application levels like XVA and other kinds of things.”

Through the partnership, Oneview’s valuation adjustments, or XVA, and risk applications will run on the OpenFin OS. The OpenFin OS provides an environment similar to the iPhone’s operating system, iOS, where the various apps interact and communicate with one another. In OpenFin’s case, a trading app can seamlessly interact with a charting app, market data grids, and—in Numerix’s case—a risk app like the ones provided through Oneview.

Traditionally, a trader would load up anywhere from six to a dozen-plus browser windows, but those windows would not interact and they would consume a lot of space on a trader’s desktop. OpenFin is looking to be the leading container provider to allow for industry-wide desktop app interoperability.

Finding a Home

Jim Jockle, Numerix’s chief marketing officer, says that putting Oneview on the OpenFin OS will allow the vendor to more easily find a home on the user’s desktop and allow the user to create a UX that fits their exact needs.

“Real estate on desktops has become very important for us to be able to present certain workflows and decision-support screens to traders, sales, and risk,” he says. “Utilizing OpenFin gives us the opportunity to break our application into native user experiences and take the appropriate ownership on traders’ or quants’ screens and give them the distinct interoperability through those screens as it relates to their particular business processes.”

Satyam Kancharla, chief strategy officer at Numerix, adds that OpenFin’s HTML5 containerization allows users to move away from a browser-based environment, it is dockable, it takes up less space and allows for greater app communication, and it provides greater security because it is run in a native environment.

“What OpenFin gives us is a sort of iOS platform for building desktop applications, while at the same time retaining all of the best practices around web services and HTML5,” Kancharla says. “The industry has embraced web services and HTML5 but this is a missing element that the industry has not standardized on. Having this type of iOS platform means that you can build apps with a lot more richness and a lot more security.”

Oneview’s trading applications allow for XVA management, structured products sales and trading, and desk-level pricing and risk management. Non-OpenFin users can still use Oneview’s traditional GUI.

Other early adopters of OpenFin’s platform include ChartIQ, GreenKey Technologies and Trading Technologies.