Developing an Integrated Desktop Environment for Financial Services

In 2019, the future for desktop applications lays in Web technology. The functional richness of such applications, which are launched from a browser, means that modern applications are often developed using HTML5. However, due to the evolving nature of the typical financial services enterprise, native applications – those designed to run on a platform that is a non-HTML5 environment – can be found deeply embedded into financial institutions’ workflows. In an effort to ameliorate the disjointed nature of these workflows – which incorporate both the old and the new – Finsemble and openfin were created. Each solution individually solves the problem of integrating applications into a desktop environment, regardless of the language the apps were written in. Using both solutions, diverse applications can be launched together in a browser with full interoperability so that developers can leverage the advantages of a HTML5 environment.

This report presents an extensive comparison between the two solutions, and it specifically explores how the functionalities of ChartIQ’s Finsemble can be utilised by a financial services institution’s development teams to solve real-world challenges.