Symphony Teams with OpenFin for Interoperability, Standardization

Mazy Dar, CEO of OpenFin, tells WatersTechnology that one of the core aspects of this collaboration is interoperability.

"Big banks and many asset managers are using OpenFin to deploy single-dealer platforms and trading applications. What they want is to be able to integrate these applications with Symphony's messaging platform," Dar says. "There are many HTML5 containers out there and the idea is to make it possible for Symphony to run in any container. So that's going to be a core focus for us, to figure out what this standardization looks like and how to make that possible."

There are two ways OpenFin will collaborate with Symphony. The first, says Gabriele Columbro, executive director of Symphony Software Foundation, is for OpenFin to work from the bottom up when it comes to the contribution of code. "We expect that there will be an integration of their container with Symphony's platform," says Columbro.

Second, OpenFin will take part in the current working groups in which most of Symphony members are involved. "One of the key working groups is around desktop wrapper technology, which can really impact in a top-down way how Symphony-related technologies are developed in open-source," says Columbro. "OpenFin will participate in this working group to identify a standard interface within Symphony and containers, and design and identify the standard for container technology."

Open-Source Alliance

For both sides, open-source technology is what they represent, so the collaboration comes as a natural development. "We are called OpenFin for a reason," says Dar. "We believe in openness, in open source and these are also core principles of the Symphony Software Foundation, so we want to support what they are doing and we want to make it successful."

Columbro says many companies want to go open source but don't know how to do it, or don't have enough space to do it. "They look at the Foundation as a place where they actually can do open innovation," Columbro says. "Both we and OpenFin leverage open source to bring faster and collaborative innovation to financial services. So this collaboration will strengthen the movement."