The financial services industry is taking a major leap forward in open, AI-native desktop infrastructure. Today, FINOS is thrilled to announce FINOS Workspace: an open-source, self-hosted desktop platform that brings analytical applications, market data widgets, and AI-assisted workflows into a single interface.

Originally developed as OpenBB Workspace, the project is officially transitioning into FINOS Labs under open, vendor-neutral governance. Financial professionals have long struggled with tools and data sources that operate in silos; FINOS Workspace bridges those gaps, giving institutions a customizable foundation to orchestrate both human and agentic workflows with complete governance over their data.

From OpenBB to FINOS Workspace

OpenBB originally started as an open-source financial analytics platform, gaining widespread traction with over 72,000 GitHub stars. Its flagship commercial product, the OpenBB Workspace, is now contributed to FINOS, with engineering leadership moving to BrightQuery to continue building the platform.

Licensed under Apache 2.0, FINOS Workspace gives financial institutions, developers, and data providers a self-hosted platform for bringing analytical applications, widgets, and AI-assisted workflows into a shared workspace.

Building on a Strong Pedigree: FDC3 & FDC3 Sail

FINOS Workspace builds directly upon FINOS’s proven track record of establishing industry standards for financial desktop interoperability. For years, the FDC3 (Financial Desktop Connectivity and Collaboration Consortium) standard and FDC3 Sail (the open-source, web-native desktop container/bus) have empowered institutions to eliminate application silos, synchronize workflows, and pass context seamlessly across disparate desktop applications.

By hosting FINOS Workspace alongside FDC3 and FDC3 Sail, FINOS aims to bridge standardized context sharing with modern, modular workspace UI components and desktop containers.

Over time, FINOS Workspace is envisioned to serve as a premier open-source surface where FDC3 context messaging, intent resolution, agentic workflows, and web-native app orchestration can seamlessly come together under a unified developer framework.

Pioneering Agentic Desktop Environments

AI is changing how users interact with financial software. Alongside navigating dashboards manually, users increasingly expect to ask questions, retrieve information, and initiate actions through an assistant.

FINOS Workspace’s roadmap aims to connect those interactions with the applications and data already available in the workspace. Areas for community development include:

• Workspace-aware assistants: Help users discover widgets, retrieve relevant data, and adjust views or parameters through natural language.
• Application and agent interoperability: Explore how FDC3 context sharing and intents can work alongside the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to connect desktop applications with AI tools.
• Choice of models and services: Enable institutions to integrate their preferred models, agent frameworks, and data backends within their own access controls and deployment policies.

These are areas for development and collaboration. The community will help define the architecture, priorities, and implementation.

Steering Committee & Industry Governance

To ensure the roadmap reflects the practical needs of both buy-side and sell-side institutions, FINOS is forming a dedicated Steering & Advisory Committee. This committee brings together key maintainers, major global banks, and leading consultancy partners to guide architectural decisions and open standards integration:

• Alexandru Dumitru (Engineering Lead - Global UI Platform at Citi)
• Kris West (FDC3 Lead Maintainer)
• Chris Watson (Lead Sail Maintainer and Head of Interoperability at AlphaFMC)
• Jorge Vasquez (Global Product Manager, Bank of America)

Together, this committee ensures that FINOS Workspace directly addresses enterprise scale, security compliance, client-facing workflows, and deep integration across the broader FINOS ecosystem.

"By contributing OpenBB Workspace to FINOS as ‘FINOS Workspace,’ we encourage institutional participation in establishing a durable, openly governed project that financial institutions can evaluate, adopt, and extend." - Jose Plehn, CEO of BrightQuery

Explore FINOS Workspace

FINOS Workspace will be featured prominently at the upcoming Open Source in Finance Forum (OSFF) in New York. We invite financial institutions, quants, developers, and technology vendors to join the community and shape the future of the open financial desktop.

• Explore FINOS Workplace: Visit the repository at github.com/finos-labs/finos-workspace
• Connect with the Community: Reach out to the maintainers and steering committee on the FINOS Slack channel or email workspace-dev@lists.finos.org
• Join the discussion: email workspace-dev@lists.finos.org
• Join the Advisory Committee: email workspace-dev@finos.org
• Explore interoperability at FINOS: Learn about FDC3 and FDC3 Sail