Finastra today announced a new milestone in its Platform as a Service (PaaS) vision, with several early adopters now developing and running apps on FusionFabric.cloud.
Fintechs, consultants, banks and academics are using the open technology platform to create and deploy innovative apps which could also be commercialized via the FusionStore portal, currently in development.
“This is an incredibly positive step for the future of financial software development,” said Hugh Cumming, CTO, at Finastra. “To see third parties from all different parts of the industry collaborating in a vibrant ecosystem, on top of our trusted technology, demonstrates a new wave of innovation. We’re enabling this shift with our rock solid FusionFabric.cloud architecture, which uses open technology to speed innovation and is based on over 35 years’ experience in the industry. It will ultimately drive down prices, provide new capabilities and accelerate time to market for exciting new app ideas.”
The Fintech view
RaisePartner is a Fintech providing specialist expertise in portfolio optimization for insurance firms. It is developing an app to support the Solvency II capital requirements and will integrate with FusionInvest, the flagship investment management solution from Finastra.
Sophie Echenim, CEO at RaisePartner said, “Being able to build on the FusionFabric.cloud architecture affords us several benefits and that’s why we jumped at the opportunity to be an early adopter. As well as being able to reach the extended Finastra customer base with our innovative offering, we can save costs and create efficiencies when it comes to development. Finastra customers will be able to enjoy the solution without any integration efforts as the app is integrated upfront with the Finastra core system data.”
The consulting firm and system integrator view
In addition, consulting firm and system integrator, GMS, is using FusionFabric.cloud to develop pricing model apps for FusionCapital and FusionInvest.
Dominique Vignaux, Managing Director at GMS said, “Working in an open innovation architecture like this provides us with a great opportunity to be an early member of this new quant community. With a GPU-enabled platform, we can leverage our expertise developing pricing models for our customers, to scale with the app model easily and quickly. We build the pricing models once on the platform and can then make them available to all Finastra customers - it’s a compelling reason to embrace the PaaS strategy.”
The academic view
Meanwhile, University College London (UCL) students are also building out apps focused on pricing models for capital markets as well as trade finance and banking.
Professor Donald Lawrence, Computational Finance Director at UCL said, “The chance to build on the FusionFabric.cloud architecture is a real advantage for our students. As well as giving them the opportunity to develop with open APIs to collaborate and drive innovative ideas, it offers access to the commercial world which isn’t always that easy or freely available. Students who develop useful and exciting new apps can feasibly sell those on to banks and financial institutions, via the store.”
Other firms on board include a tier one Australian bank which is already looking to use some of the apps in development, as well as building pricing apps of its own.
The Finastra PaaS strategy and award-winning FusionFabric.cloud platform champion innovation, with open interfaces, standards and architecture. Firms developing within this ecosystem benefit from the agile development environment, parallel processing capabilities as well as a graphics processing unit (GPU) - meaning they can easily create and deploy applications quickly and at a low cost.