ING Ventures, the venture capital arm of ING, has made a $10m strategic investment in OpenFin, the operating system of enterprise productivity, becoming the 7th major financial institution to not only buy OpenFin but also become a strategic partner.
ING adopted OpenFin’s technology in 2021 to accelerate the bank’s desktop transformation strategy. Employees now have access to easy workspace management and automated workflows designed to help increase productivity.
“All of our bank investors have been users of our technology before they became investors, and that’s a really important point,” says Adam Toms, Chief Operating Officer at OpenFin. “Lots of strategic units look for that validation from inside their organisation to see if the product is solving real problems, if it is helping with their transformation, or with projects and agendas they have internally.”
OpenFin’s web-based OS, now used at more than 2,400 banks, wealth and asset management firms in 60+ countries, has become the de facto standard in financial services for powering next-generation applications and digital experiences for employees and clients.
The strategic investment from ING follows a period of accelerated growth since last year’s launch of OpenFin Workspace, the new visual interface of OpenFin OS that includes components for complex windowing, advanced search, actionable notifications and application discovery. Built on Google’s Chromium engine, OpenFin OS simplifies app distribution, unifies the digital workspace and enables seamless interoperability and workflow between apps.
“Interoperability is just one of the things OpenFin does,” says Toms. “The security aspects of what OpenFin delivers on the desktop continue to be of real interest. The fact that we’re built on Google’s Chromium engine and co-stable with Chrome is incredibly important to our customers because they know that they can access the latest security patches from the Chromium team. So it’s really about how do we secure the desktop? How do we innovate around the end user, drive better employee experience, and increase productivity? Data interoperability is just one feature of that interface.”
OpenFin created the FDC3 (Financial Desktop Connectivity and Collaboration Consortium) standard for desktop interoperability in 2017, which is now widely used across the industry. “We’re the founders of FDC3, it’s embedded in our product, and we probably have one of the most forward leaning implementations of FDC3,” says Toms. “We have so many customers with real world use cases, who give us very relevant feedback about how they want to consume FDC3 from a technology perspective. So we continue to make an investment in all of those areas.”
The capital from ING will be used to accelerate expansion of OpenFin OS to every user within financial services. The firm’s software is already being used by 23 of top 25 global banks ,as well as many of the world’s leading asset managers and financial services vendors.
Other OpenFin investors include Bain Capital Ventures, Barclays, CME Ventures, DRW Venture Capital, HSBC, J.P. Morgan, NYCA Partners, Pivot Investment Partners, SC Ventures and Wells Fargo Strategic Capital.
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