Eikos Partners, fintech consultants who help capital market participants solve some of their most complex technology and operational challenges, is commercializing JSCatalyst, a JavaScript toolkit that accelerates application development and provides designers with a tool to declaratively build user interfaces that function across all types of devices and browsers. A tier one investment bank and top 10 hedge fund have already deployed the toolkit, with an institutional asset manager going through a POC.

Since financial institutions still operate as silos and legacy systems continue to prevail, business and IT collaboration remains challenging. Implementing an innovative idea or creating a new application that works across devices in a consistent environment becomes a mammoth task. By bringing information technology capability back toward the core of the enterprise, the Eikos Partners team is helping firms build new-era technology skills and capabilities, offering significant competitive advantage.

David Lattimore-Gay, co-founder and CTO, Eikos Partners, said, “Fintech generates excitement, however with disruption comes change to existing architecture and the creation of new deployment challenges. It’s no longer acceptable to have applications that only function in a basic web browser. Developers need to think user first. With existing infrastructure and resources within financial institutions, this way of thinking is not a given. This situation leads to poor user experience and solutions. The right toolkit can iron out 95 percent of operational and technical challenges so development teams can focus on adding strategic business value from day one, taking a consistent approach that can withstand the test of time – even when requirements change.”

JSCatalyst provides an alternative to existing toolkits by allowing applications within legacy ecosystems such as .NET and Java to participate as well. The open source toolkit, in combination with its design thinking methodology for financial services, helps buy and sell side firms take a user-first approach when creating business solutions leaving software infrastructure to the open source community.

Mike DeSanti, CTO, LightPoint Financial Technology, said, “LightPoint has developed a next generation trading, risk and analytics platform, the foundation of which is a revolutionary-designed investment book of record (iBOR)]. This system is designed to use microservices and delivered as a cloud based SaaS application. JSCatalyst provides an extensible platform that we can use to create user interfaces that can share a common code base, and is able to run as a desktop application, in a browser, or on a tablet or phone. This ability to be device agnostic is key. Traders and portfolio managers want to be able to take their desktops with them when they are out of the office or on the road. The user interfaces are complex and need to be customized according to an individual trader’s or portfolio manager’s needs. If we had to support a separate code base for each type of device it would complicate and lengthen our development process, costing us time and money. Instead, we can modify a single code base that can run across multiple devices, which increases our ability to be responsive to our customers.”

A tier one investment bank is already leveraging JSCatalyst and is now able to seize on opportunities in real time and reduce risk exposure, freeing up capital. A top tier hedge fund used the open source toolkit to build a high-performing, low-latency styled blotter application for its traders.

You can find more information on the framework here. To view the blotter, including a live app on OpenFin, see here.