Product Blog

Building an operating system for financial services

December 21, 2016

The personal computer received its breakthrough during the 1980’s when Microsoft was the first company to really excel at building an ecosystem. The ecosystem that Microsoft built was based on offering an operating system for computers. The operating system, that today is called Windows, is used for running numerous applications. When a company is going to build a new application to solve a specific problem they do not start by building a new operating system. Instead they decide to work with one or two operating systems and they get down to building their application that solves a customer specific problem.

At Bricknode we are trying to build a new operating system for Financial Service companies and their customers. Our operating system is called Bricknode Financial Systems, BFS for short. In BFS we are trying to include all the standard stuff that you would expect from a Financial Service operating system like native support for accounts, transactions, financial instruments, users etc. We then offer an open API where others can work with our operating system.

We have built a few standard applications for our operating system like securities back office, advisor interface and customer front end. These are larger applications, like Microsoft Office, and then we have published a number of specialised apps that we offer in our Marketplace, like for example the Fee Manager, Insurance File Importer and the Subscription Manager.

The specialised apps are totally separate from the operating system and have their own release cycles which enables app makers to deliver value to their customers even faster. Heads up, the Subscription Manager is scheduled for a new release during the next couple of days!

So far we have several teams around the world that works with BFS to build apps. We are quickly building a community with developers and there will shortly be more apps published like the Peer-to-Peer lending application by Lendysoft.

I truly believe that BFS could act as the operating system, or engine if you wish, for any FinTech company of financial service firm.