The Future of FX: How OpenFin Workspace Combats the Complexities of Rapid Digital Transformation

As in many asset classes across the capital markets, the foreign exchange (FX) market has greatly benefited from technological innovation. Buy-side managers trading FX are at long last gaining access to a wide range of tools and platforms that improve access to real-time data and liquidity, optimizing the benefits of electronification and addressing their longstanding frustrations with legacy technologies.

This digital transformation has been a welcome shift for the industry, but the rise of smarter trading tools is simultaneously creating a new challenge for traders. It's a paradox: innovation in FX technology has armed firms with powerful new capabilities, but also created workflow complexity for end users, preventing them from deriving the full benefits. The result? Trader desktops full of exciting but fragmented applications that are difficult to use in a unified, intuitive manner.

To prepare for and thrive in any set of market conditions, these tools and technologies cannot exist in a vacuum in which they are easy enough to use on their own but unable to seamlessly share information. This is especially important in the FX market, which contains no primary venues and emphasizes instantaneous decision-making, heightening the need for efficiency.

Without a solution, workflows will remain fragmented and essential data and processes will continue to be dispersed across multiple applications. With this, the imperative is clear: now that traders have the tools to get the job done, the industry must focus on unifying the desktop experience for users to drive greater efficiency.

That’s where we come in. OpenFin’s award-winning OS is the foundation for an intelligent desktop, with our Workspace product enabling actionable notifications, customizable browser layouts, app docking and universal search. By acting as a unified space for all desktop functions, we’re enabling both the buy and sell sides to incorporate best-of-breed applications into their workflows while simultaneously improving productivity and efficiency. But what does that look like in practice?

One of the key pain points for traders is time lost to rifling through multiple messages and notification windows to track down information. This is simply a nonstarter – in today’s fast-moving markets, the importance of targeted transmission of information cannot be overstated. As ever, information must rapidly and intelligently flow from the front office to the back office. And with a significant portion of today’s workforce working in remote and hybrid settings, the need for streamlined communications is more vital than ever.

That’s why we’ve made communication one of our top priorities, as evidenced by our Notification Center module and our newly rendered chat system integrations. Equipped with robust prioritization capabilities and fully customizable to meet the needs of individual users, these tools empower traders to cut through the noise and execute on tasks with unparalleled efficiency.

Another major challenge for FX trading has been the addition of specialized venues, which now augment traditional OTC trading but introduce complexities in terms of liquidity discovery. With this, we understand that having access to the right tools, the right analytics and the right partners is more important to achieving best execution than ever before.

That’s why we don’t stand in the way of firms that want to build their own best-of-breed network of counterparties and platforms. Instead, we enable them to create their ideal desktop, so traders are fully empowered to forge their own path to best execution. In enabling a superior user experience, OpenFin supports liquidity formation amid growing electronification and the multitude of workflows that venues have introduced.

With OpenFin Home, FX traders can access the information they need to make mission-critical decisions without hesitation, all from a single, intuitively designed interface. This hub of activity consolidates all internal and vendor apps on the desktop, enabling smooth user journeys with seamless interoperability. The combination of these cutting-edge Workspace features empowers users to control and command their entire workflows with minimal effort.

We are a trusted partner to our clients with a track record that speaks for itself. Our tools are successfully used by major banks, brokers and vendors around the world to deploy their next-generation client experience, creating a large, reliable and trusted ecosystem for the modern FX landscape.  A dozen major bank and broker platforms work with OpenFin’s unrivaled technology as do leading liquidity platforms, analytics solutions and multi-asset execution management systems  in total - with our support of more than 3,500 applications,OpenFin is the unifying layer for some of the biggest names in the industry.

In today’s work-from-anywhere environment, traders need to be able to link applications across multi-screen workstations and access to the right workflow tools while also minimizing the screen real estate they occupy. With a heritage of solving complex workflow challenges, the team at OpenFin is committed to continuing to build solutions by and for the growing FX market.

Want to learn more? Be sure to catch me and our exceptional sales team at TradeTech FX, or feel free to drop us a line.