Community Spotlight: Interoperability & Regtech Hackathon Winners

For this month’s Community Spotlight feature, we're excited to highlight ...

Last week we hosted our first FINOS hackathon at the BMO offices in New York and London. Over 100 developers and financial professionals worked together to create innovative solutions on 10+ Member defined challenges/use cases. The event was a massive success with participants from across New York, London and remote locations. 

First place went to the FDC3 Java API project, developed by the team at Wellington. They benefited from a very tightly scoped project and also being ruthlessly organized in order to put together the winning Hackathon entry. In this, they ported the FDC3 API from Typescript into Java so that it could be used in an existing Java trading application. They then wrote a Java implementation that talked to OpenFin (a popular FDC-conformant desktop agent). We’re hoping this work leads the way to a standardized Java API for FDC3! Code will be shortly hosted on https://github.com/finos-labs/fdc3-java-api

Second place was awarded to the Adaptive team, for their Jupyter Notebook with FDC3 integration. FDC3 hasn’t been seen together with Python before, but this team managed to get FINOS’ FDC3 Sail Desktop Agent to run a Juypter notebook as an FDC3 application, and then use that application to pass context data to other applications running in the FDC3 Desktop.  It’s really interesting stuff and an incredible amount of work achieved in a very short space of time. Code is available at https://github.com/finos-labs/jupyter_finos_widgets

Third place went to RBC, Citi, Capital One and Morgan Stanley for their implementation of LCR using Morphir, which is already a FINOS Top Level Project. During the hackathon, the goal was to move forward with the implementation, build test scenarios and gather feedback also from non-developers on how to interact with the LCR specifications. Developers from RBC, Capital One and Citi joined forces with Morgan Stanley and went above and beyond what was initially planned. A shout out to Stephen Goldbaum, Lead Maintainer of Morphir and LCR projects at FINOS, who worked relentlessly during the two hackathon days to coordinate all these efforts; you can find the results in the form of Pull Requests that are waiting to be approved and merged.

Fourth place was awarded to Dov Katz and Clifford Tiltman from Morgan Stanley and Gareth Ncube at UBS for their TraderX project, a sample trading application which can be used for experimenting with various techniques and other open source projects, such as GitHub Codespaces, Vuu and FDC3. It is designed to be simple and accessible to programmers of all backgrounds, and can serve as a starting point for educational and experimentation purposes. Thanks to Dov and the team for coming up with this initiative and participating in the Hackathon from the BMO offices in London, as they managed to organize, develop, deliver and win the attention of judges, although far away from the event’s main venue. You can find their work in a pending Pull Request on https://github.com/finos-labs/traderX/pull/13

Finally, the Symphony team won fifth place for their FDC3 Share Identity between applications project. Identity has been a hot topic in the FDC3 world for some time now so it’s great to see some progress on this. There have been proposals in the past to allow the user’s identity to be shared as FDC3 context and in this entry the Symphony team deliver on this with a proof-of-concept, demonstrating how Symphony (the chat application) can be used to provide the user’s identity to other applications who need it running in the FDC3 Desktop. The Symphony team is expected to present their solution in the next FDC3 meetings and share code in FINOS Labs repository, stay tuned!

Check out all repositories contributed during the FINOS Hackathon on https://github.com/topics/finos-hackathon-bmo

Thank you to our hosts, BMO and Major League Hacking, as well as our judges Kim-Jaffee-Prado of BMO, Michael P. Lynch of Symphony, Kabir Rekhi of RBC, and Stephen Goldbaum of Morgan Stanley. We’d also like to thank all the participants for making this event possible.