Use Cases and Workflows Discussion Group - 7th March 2024

[mistryvinay]

Group overview

Newly rebranded "Use Cases and Workflows" discussion group for FDC3, replacing "Context Data and Intents".

The remit of this discussion group is:

• talking about existing or potential financial use-cases
• unlocking the power of standardisation
• discussing new ways to collaborate either inside the organisation or firm-to-firm
• sharing expert insights about how to make the most out of FDC3
• and collaborating to shaping the future of financial workflows.

Relevant issue tags

Current open issues that relate to the discussion group:

Specific issues will also be tagged with the labels:

Meeting Date

Thursday 7 Mar 2024 - 9am (US eastern timezone EST) / 2pm (London, GMT)

Zoom info

• Join Zoom Meeting
• Meeting ID: 969 4029 4948
• Passcode: 636931
• Dial-in:

  Country	International Dial-in	Toll-free Dial-in
  US	+1 929 205 6099 (New York)	877 853 5247
  UK	+44 330 088 5830	0800 031 5717
  France	+33 1 8699 5831	0 800 940 415
  Find your local number	https://zoom.us/u/ad2WVnBzb8

Meeting notices

• FINOS Project leads are responsible for observing the FINOS guidelines for running project meetings. Project maintainers can find additional resources in the FINOS Maintainers Cheatsheet.

• All participants in FINOS project meetings are subject to the LF Antitrust Policy, the FINOS Community Code of Conduct and all other FINOS policies.

• FINOS meetings involve participation by industry competitors, and it is the intention of FINOS and the Linux Foundation to conduct all of its activities in accordance with applicable antitrust and competition laws. It is therefore extremely important that attendees adhere to meeting agendas, and be aware of, and not participate in, any activities that are prohibited under applicable US state, federal or foreign antitrust and competition laws. Please contact legal@finos.org with any questions.

• FINOS project meetings may be recorded for use solely by the FINOS team for administration purposes. In very limited instances, and with explicit approval, recordings may be made more widely available.

• A Discussion Group has no direct decision-making power regarding the FDC3 standard - rather it is intended that anything they propose or work on will result in proposals (via Github issues and PRs) for the Standards Working Group participants to consider and vote on for inclusion in the standard.

Participation Requirements

Note: Meeting participants are expected to accept the terms of the FDC3 license (Community Specification License), understand the governance process and have a CLA in place.

Please click the following links at the start of the meeting if you have not done so previously.

• View the CSL
• View the GOVERNANCE of the Project
• Click here to start a PR.
  • Edit the page to add your details.
  • Hit the save button.
  • Click "Create Pull Request".
  • Click "Accept" on the EasyCLA dialog in the PR's discussion section.
• Click here to send email to become a voting participant on the FDC3 Project

Tracking Attendance

Note: Meeting participants are expected to add a comment to this GitHub issue in order that we can track attendance of FDC3 project meetings. Please do this at the start of the meeting.

Agenda

• Convene & roll call, review meeting notices (5mins)
• Introduction to new format and purpose of meeting (20mins)
• Discussion of open issues (20mins)
  • NatWest Group FDC3 Use Case Exploration #1164
• AOB & Adjourn (5mins)

Minutes

• Introduction of newly created Use Cases and Workflows Discussion Group
  • Focus on exploring financial use cases and workflows that can be enabled over FDC3 desktop agents.
  • Seeking participation from business teams to identify workflows and use cases that would benefit from FDC3.
  • Outlining those use cases and then making sure that they're supported technologically.
  • Extend the FDC3 Standard by introducing additional Intent and Context types to support both internal and cross company workflows.
• Re-Focus on the end user persona
  • The Context Data and Intents working group meetings was where the maintainers and participants helped build a foundational building blocks for FDC3 in terms capabilities.
  • Shift focus to our end users, who would be the end users of FDC3 and understand their workflows in more detail. Because that ultimately would define what additional kind of context and intents are introduced into the FDC3 Standard.
    • How to dig into the problem:
    • Understand our Users -> Their Workflows -> Investigate Workflow steps
  • Discovery session to understand different types of user personas within financial services that would be a user of FDC3.
  • A list of end user personas we identified in this meeting can be found Understanding the FDC3 End-User Personas #1173. Not an exhaustive list, the community are encouraged to add more personas that are applicable.
    • @bpgandluri identified some personas through various lines of business within Fidelity which include Trader, Back Office Operations and Customer Service Associates.
    • @frank suggested Portfolio Managers and Analysts are probably a more higher frequency user of interop where you're looking at some data, your portfolio holdings or whatever, and you want to see something in Factset or Bloomberg related to what you clicked on.
    • @Lecss suggested Developer persona, potential to streamline workflows. Daily processes you may have to do releases. You need to monitor your build. There are a lot of tools that you use on a daily basis. Be nice to have a workspace created for a specific scenario that you can quickly switch between and then allow interoperability between.
    • @aaronhaines suggested Retail personas as in retail banking. People in branch who have to manage multiple applications. They have multiple applications that they need to manage to handle various customer use cases. Also Quants which could roll up into Analysts, Wealth Management or Portfolio Managers./
• Identify day-to-day responsibilities and workflows for each end-user persona
  • Walkthrough of persona template that we will be using to capture information for our end-users identified in the previous discovery session.
    • Try to identify our end-users day-to-day responsibilities and repetitive workflows that may carry out. Trying to identify any pain points that exist with the current method of working.
    • @kriswest Identify the things that your firms are trying to make better, whether you're a software vendor and trying to add value for somebody or whether you're a bank or a hedge fund or some other buyside financial organization, whether you're trying to solve one of your own problems. That's what we need to get to.
      • Many of you that are working on implementations at the moment will be finding things you don't have, whether they are pieces of data that you need to put into existing messages, or just whole workflow steps, intents that don't exist yet, or context messages that need to pass during a particular step.
    • @robmoffat So for each of these different personas we list out a few of the workflows that persona might be involved in? Obviously the all the people that have mentioned these different personas on the call probably have some workflow in mind.
    • @alex Zeller interest in Traders Sales and Trader personas generally. That's the problem we're trying to solve. Trying to figure out is what's been done so we don't have to reinvent the wheel. Challenges, we have a lot of data, a lot of pre trade data. So price discovery coming from different venues with different fields. Where trade leaders at either asset management, asset managers or who will effectively want to have a look at and do less dual input as they necessarily have to.
      • Incoming trade from an unstructured platform arriving for pricing. Ecommerce platform, pricing engine says this is illiquid, price manually. Or, it's for a currency that isn't liquid at that time. We should extract the details and start populating the details with zero effort.
      • Ability to Pre-populating forms ready to run
      • Minimise steps to roll over a trade
      • Go from a calculator -> to a transaction
    • @kriswest Trade type not all done yet. We did some work on last year looking at booking trades, describing products, creating orders for things that are experimental grade at the moment because they need more input and people to start using them. Identify whats missing, for example trade start value dates.
    • @frank Bader: When I'm trying to switch a platform to FDC3, point of integration can only handle the use case of sending an identifier from one system to another. There's a lot missing there. Other points of integration, loading prices, financial information - it's all custom there's no standard for these entities.
      • FDC3 doesn't define these, You need a contract with a custom FDC3 context
    • @karlmoll @robmoffat introduced CDM project. Are there models in CDM we could leverage to identify types. Maybe explore a CDM FDC3 integrations and whether we can start moving types from one to the other.
    • @kriswest One of the goals of this group has been to try and start doing that top down view. But open to contribution with a load of bottom up information. If the community have been building these? For example.
    • For @frank, you have a list of the steps already that you've had to create types for. Take it bottom up, start with that list and just add on the workflows and who they relate to because ultimately that's where we're headed to is trying to get out the list of steps, the list of missing objects or types and then go from there.

Action Items

• Review end-user personas who would/could be FDC3 users. Understanding the FDC3 End-User Personas #1173
  • Do we need to add any additional ones?
• For each end-user persona.
  • Provide a brief description of their role.
  • From a birds-eye-view what are their day to day activities/workflows.
  • What are their pain points. Identify inefficiencies switching between platforms or systems to find information. Rekeying data.

Untracked attendees

Full name	Affiliation	GitHub username

[mistryvinay]

Vinay Mistry / Symphony 🎵

[fapulito]

David Anderson / Independent Developer

[robmoffat]

Rob Moffat / FINOS 🪂

[karlmoll]

Karl Moll / FINOS

[kriswest]

Kris West / interop.io 🚀

[Lecss]

Alex Dumitru / Citi

[aaronhaines]

Aaron Haines / LSEG

[tpina]

Tiago Pina / Carbonplace

[karlmoll]

Here is the interest form for the CDM meetup in NYC (CC @eteridvalishvili )

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/7QLNWMZ

[hughtroeger]

Hugh Troeger / FactSet

[bpgandluri]

Bhanu Gandluri/Fidelity Investments