FDC3

FDC3 stands for Financial Desktop Connectivity and Collaboration Consortium, and is an industry standard enabling desktop application interoperability to lower developer costs and transform user workflows. FDC3 was established by OpenFin in 2017 and contributed to the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FinOS) in May 2018 to accelerate industry-wide adoption.

FDC3 envisions a world driven by small apps with targeted features that can automatically share context and indicate intent to one another. The ultimate goal of the FDC3 project is to enable a user experience on the financial desktop on par with what they enjoy on mobile devices.

When to use FDC3

FDC3 is all about (re)usability and low-touch integration. Applications that are FDC3-enabled can take part in a workflow on the desktop without any coding or manual integration, allowing replacement of one application with another application serving the same functions to the desktop (in FDC3 terms - supporting the same Intents and Context). In this sense, FDC3 is advantageous for every application. However, it's useful for applications that need to connect to an application that is already using FDC3 or applications that may need to interoperate with other applications in the future.