FDC3

FDC3 is an open standard for interoperability on the financial desktop, developed at FINOS and stewarded under the Linux Foundation. A trader or analyst runs a dozen applications from a dozen vendors — an order management system, a chat client, a charting tool, a research terminal — and historically none of them could hand a symbol, an instrument, or a contact to another without a bespoke integration. FDC3 replaces that with a common vocabulary and a common calling convention.

• Desktop Agent API - The runtime contract an application talks to in order to find, launch, and message other applications on the same desktop.
• Intents - Verbs like ViewChart or StartCall that let one application ask for an outcome without knowing which application will fulfill it.
• Context Data - Standardized JSON payloads for the things the industry actually passes around — instruments, organizations, contacts, positions — each backed by a JSON Schema.
• App Directory - A discoverable registry of applications and the intents they handle, so the desktop can resolve a request at runtime.

FDC3 is worth watching outside of finance because it solves a problem the rest of the industry is only now confronting: how independent applications discover each other’s capabilities and exchange typed context at runtime. That is the same shape as tool discovery in Model Context Protocol and capability negotiation in Agent2Agent — an intent, a resolver, and a schema-bound payload. FDC3 has been running that pattern in production on regulated desktops since 2018, which makes it a useful reference implementation for anyone designing agent interoperability now. See also CALM, the other specification FINOS brings into the specification layer.