ipushpull sees cloud adoption streamline financial markets workflows

In recent months ipushpull has onboarded several new Capital Markets customers. In each case the customer has selected a cloud-deployed instance of ipushpull hosted on Amazon Web Services, our cloud partner, for their financial markets workflows.

While adoption of the cloud is widespread in other industries, enterprises in financial markets have long been reluctant to deploy to the cloud. Concerns around security, regulatory compliance and data privacy are commonly cited, not to mention pre-existing investment in expensive on-premises infrastructure. But this landscape is changing as market participants recognise that cloud can be cheaper and more secure than on-premise, and as they begin to appreciate the many additional advantages that cloud services bring. For example, one key feature of cloud services that’s frequently raised during our conversations with our capital markets network is the availability of sophisticated computing resources such as machine learning and AI – resources that are difficult to replicate internally.

Even the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) has given its seal of approval to cloud vendors and is “seeking to leverage cloud in order to improve service value and control risk”. They “see no fundamental reason why cloud services cannot be implemented in a manner that complies with [their] rules”. This progressive view towards cloud, by one of the world’s leading regulatory bodies, further helps to drive cloud adoption. In turn, this helps to drive innovation across huge banking digital transformation projects through faster time to market, better agility and almost infinite scalability.

Cloud deployments are also particularly suited to the kind of cross-market data distribution and buy-side/sell-side workflow automation applications enabled by ipushpull. The cloud provides the simple connectivity that’s essential for implementing real-time data workflows between sell-side and buy-side counterparties and enabling secure distribution of reference data to thousands of consumers.

Which companies are moving their financial markets workflows to the cloud?

ipushpull is core to the risk management process at Amplify Trading, the global trading and trading education provider, where they use our service for real-time position tracking and risk aggregation across their global trading team. Traders in multiple locations push live trading data to ipushpull, where it is aggregated and used to generate live reports for risk and portfolio managers. Will de Lucy, Amplify’s Managing Director, says:

“The ability to access critical information from any location and on different devices means the team can also monitor live prices in real-time in and out the office”.

Workflows with other customers include real-time axe distribution and reference data-as-a-service (DaaS). While the specific workflows may be different, in every case the cloud approach has enabled fast onboarding and rapid, iterative implementation, thereby providing a competitive advantage.

Attitudes to the perceived risk of the cloud are changing, computing power is growing, and machine learning and data analytics are adding value to business. And as costs continue to fall the cloud will continue to rise. To find out how ipushpull can help you in your cloud journey, please get in touch.

September 21, 2017September 27, 2017

As enterprise chat replaces email, what’s replacing attachments?

It used to be so easy. If you wanted to share a document or a spreadsheet with your colleagues or clients you had one choice – attach it to an email and hit send. Email is reasonably fast and reliable and accessible by everyone, whether they are running Gmail in a browser or Outlook on the desktop. But times have changed. Driven by version control frustrations, email fatigue, security concerns and the desire for faster, more interactive communication, email is increasingly being overshadowed by a growing range of desktop chat applications. As chat replaces email, the range of communication and collaboration options available to businesses is radically expanding.

So how can you share information when you don’t know how your customers are going to access it? That’s the problem we at ipushpull are solving. We let our customers securely share live data with their networks regardless of the apps they use to consume it. We call it ‘real-time data interoperability’.

Explosive Growth of Chat apps and Collaboration Platforms – Chat replaces email

While the rise of consumer mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp has been hogging the headlines, an almighty battle has been brewing for dominance of the enterprise messaging and collaboration market. In the years since Slack’s launch in 2013 it’s been joined by a range of heavyweight competitors including Symphony, Microsoft Teams, Facebook Workplace and, most recently, Atlassian’s Stride. While each company has differing ambitions for their platforms, they all aim to reduce the amount of email sent internally and between businesses.

Symphony’s CEO David Gurle has said:

“People want much richer communication than email and there’s really no secure, compliant alternative in the market today. That’s the reason Symphony exists. If there’s anything we’re going to disrupt it’s going to be the different messaging tools across enterprises.”

More succinctly, Stewart Butterfield of Slack predicted at Slack’s inaugural ‘Frontiers’ conference last week:

“Chat channels will replace email by 2025.”

Sharing Data, not Files

So in this post-email, post-attachment future, how can people securely share their information across applications and ensure that it’s always up-to-date? ipushpull is tackling this problem, with the launch of our Symphony app in June, and the release of the new version of our Slack app in September. Both apps enable our customers to access their latest business data regardless of source, and securely share it with their networks.

No more Walled Gardens

We quickly realised that targeting every chat app with the same ‘lowest common denominator’ integration would be wrong. Each platform has its own technical strengths and weaknesses, and each is used by different user communities with different requirements and concerns.

On the technical side, Symphony allows its partners to integrate HTML5 applications within its platform, enabling us to build a rich user experience that facilitates collaboration and minimises context switching.

Slack doesn’t support such integrations (yet) but we’ve managed to stretch its capabilities and are the only application in their app directory that supports real time updates.

Most of Symphony’s customers are based in the financial markets where time is critical and security and compliance are just as important. ipushpull’s integration with Symphony enables users to stream live updating data to their network from applications like Microsoft Excel, and collaborate in real time without leaving the application and without compromising their security.

Real time Data Interoperability

The move to messaging and collaboration platforms only solves half the problem of email overload. The real gains are made when you replace attachments with something real-time and much more interactive. By going beyond files and connecting data, ipushpull allows end users to reduce application context switching and streamline workflow, enabling true collaboration.

The ultimate result is improvement in productivity and efficiency, accessing live data securely regardless of application. We call it real-time data interoperability.

December 22, 2016February 23, 2017

Tech trends 2017: Convergence – Not the movie

Convergence. Sounds like the title of a dodgy b-movie, doesn’t it? And it is. In fact, there are several. But I’m not concerned with badly-scripted, straight-to-streaming films today. Convergence is one of the hottest subjects in tech press at the moment, particularly in the area of cloud services and productivity tools. For tech trends 2017: convergence is likely to remain there and here’s why.

Some are euphemistically calling it a bundling event, which sounds like a Black Friday sale at Walmart, but it amounts to the same thing: implement or acquire exactly the same features as everyone else and force them into your core product. In other words, the tech equivalent of a huddle of hipsters hanging-out in the same Dalston dive and choosing to assert their individuality by growing exactly the same beard.

Dropbox announced their new suite of productivity tools, which amount to a loosely-related collection of features that have been cherry-picked from the likes of Evernote, Office 365, Quip and others.

Slack integrated voice calling into their product earlier this year, just in time for Microsoft to announce Teams, which is essentially Slack with voice and video calling (as noted by CEO Stewart Butterfield in a full-page ad in the New York Times). In a move that surprised nobody, Slack responded this week with the addition of video calling (sadly lacking the very useful screen-sharing facility in Teams). Incidentally, both of these products look a lot like Yammer, which is, of course, owned by Microsoft.

I don’t know about you, but I’m struggling to keep up. You might argue that this sort of product convergence is good for competition and consumer choice; I can see that argument too. The problem for end-users is, when every product claims to do everything for everyone, how do we choose the right one?

Tech trends 2017: Convergence or integration?

Convergence is just another way of saying the current trend in tech is to value convenience over function. If it continues, we will simply end up with a selection of cloud-based multi-tools and users will find themselves choosing between the digital equivalent of a tin-opener attachment or the tool for removing stones from horse’s hooves.

The trouble is, as anyone who has ever tried to fix the car with a Leatherman or put up a shelf using a Swiss Army Knife will know, these general-purpose tools will only get you so far. They are fine for simple tasks, but bigger projects require more specialised and sophisticated tools to get the job done well.

It’s a feeling that will be familiar to anyone who has ever tried to perform some serious financial analysis using an online spreadsheet (assuming you’ve solved the not-insignificant problem of accessing the data you need in the cloud), or do something as simple as generate a table of contents in the online version of Microsoft Word.

When it comes to technology, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery; integration is. At iPushPull, we are striving to bring together the tools you know, whether on desktop or mobile, with the accessibility of the cloud. We don’t believe convenience has to come at the cost of function, and we certainly don’t subscribe to the view that you need to give up the powerful, fully-featured applications you need in order to be productive.

The list of tools we are integrated with is expanding continuously, and now includes Slack, WordPress, Microsoft Teams, PDFs and of course Excel. You can chat in Slack with your team while viewing live updating data, host it on your WordPress website, or simply view live data on your mobile with our platform.

Start your 30 day free trial to see what iPushPull can do for you.

June 21, 2016June 23, 2016

What makes a good collaboration platform?

Symphony and Markit partnership boost collaboration in Financial Services

Symphony and Markit have announced a partnership to promote the adoption of a Collaboration Platform as a Service (CPaaS) in the financial industry. The news is likely to provide a boost to the adoption of collaboration platforms across a sector which has been traditionally reluctant to entrust its confidential content to third party services. The partners have released few details, but have indicated that the service will combine Symphony’s messaging platform with Markit’s data feeds and analytics to provide new applications, starting with reference data and advanced charting apps. So what makes a good collaboration platform?

Collaboration platform improves business efficiency

Collaboration Platforms aim to improve business efficiency by automating manual workflows and integrating communications into the applications people already use. iPushPull‘s customers, for example, use our plugins for Microsoft Excel to share live data across the office or to the other side of the planet directly from their existing desktop applications, reducing emails and accelerating business processes. However, the term collaboration is broad, incorporating everything from cloud-based productivity tools like Google Sheets to unified communications platforms like Slack and Circuit. It remains to be seen what Symphony and Markit will bring to the party.

Collaboration platforms must be available across every device

To succeed in an increasingly mobile world, a collaboration service must be available across every device. On mobile, lack of integration between applications actively hinders productivity, as Network World recently highlighted:

The process of switching between applications on a desktop is inconvenient, but most users manage. On a mobile device, having to constantly flip between applications while trying to remember data or cut and paste data is inefficient and can make users less productive.

Symphony has been slow to release mobile applications – its iPhone app only debuted this month, and we await the arrival of its Android offering.

Data Security and Encryption

The main sticking point preventing financial organisations from entrusting their confidential data to third-party services is concern about data security. The business and reputational risks associated with data breaches are potentially enormous. Both Symphony and iPushPull incorporate end-to-end encryption to reduce the risk of breaches, but we’ve found that financial service customers still insist on on-premises deployments of iPushPull to keep their data under their control. As the pressure to cut costs continues across the financial sector, the adoption of secure cloud services is likely to grow.

iPushPull lets you share live data between the applications you already use and the web. It automates workflows and simplifies business processes. It’s secure, access controlled and encrypted end-to-end. Sign up here for a free trial.

April 28, 2016November 19, 2018

ipushpull WordPress Plugin – What are our users creating?

Are you looking for a way to embed a dynamic data table in your WordPress website or blog? Did you know that there is a WordPress plug-in for that! May be you have a sports team and would like to share the league table live on your website with data updating regularly, or you have a small travel business where customers book online and you would like to show them the event information live on your website instantly whenever it is updated.

Embedding Live Excel spreadsheets in your WordPress website

Embedding Live Excel spreadsheets in your WordPress website or blog does not need to be as complex as you would think. ipushpull WordPress plug-in lets you embed live, updating data from your desktop Excel spreadsheet easily. There is no need for file saving or importing required. You only need to have an ipushpull account to be able to use the plug-in.

WordPress Plugin

After our WordPress plugin launch we started seeing organic growth of our users worldwide and came across many interesting user cases. In this blog post, we want to share with you what our users are doing with our WordPress plugin. We have users all the way from Brazil covering the carnival live data on their website, live event booking information, live golf and fishing leader-board tables to trading information. It is always interesting to see how customers use our platform.

If you would like to learn how to make real-time data live on a webpage without any development please read our latest blog post “Live data on your website, powered by ipushpull and Microsoft Excel”

Here are some examples from our users who have successfully embedded live data to their webpage with the help of ipushpull WordPress plugin:

TOSoption

TOSoption help their clients achieve financial success and sustainable wealth building. Their Real-Time Scanner show updating live data through charts and excel sheets embedded on their website. Check their Real-Time scanner below. Please scroll left or right to see more.

Amplify Trading

Here is another great example from Amplify Trading on their blog As crude oil continues to surge, who’s best to follow on Twitter for energy news.

The South Dakota Elite Walleye Series

The South Dakota Elite Walleye Series is a locally owned professional fishing circuit and they have chosen ipushpull to showcase their leaderboard on their website.

Let us know if you choose ipushpull, we would love to see how you use our WordPress plugin.

April 26, 2016November 21, 2016

Live data on your website, powered by iPushPull and Microsoft Excel

Live Data. Just data. It’s everywhere. But how do you get it into a web post in a format that your customers, colleagues or readers find engaging? You could copy and paste it of course, but what happens when that data changes. What happens if that data is continually updating? You need a live webpage, but that requires the expertise of a web-developer, right?

Wrong! In this post we’re going to show you how you can create a live webpage in just a few minutes using the familiar applications you use every day, like Microsoft Excel. Best of all, there’s no programming or scripting required. Anyone can do it!

Live Data – how to showcase it on your webpage?

For this example, we’re going to create simple webpage that shows stock-market prices. This data is available on many different websites. We’re going to use this page on the BBC website. It’s just a static page, and the prices are delayed by 15 minutes, but that’s fine for our purposes.

First, we’re going to pull the BBC page into our Excel workbook. Open up Excel and make sure you’re logged in to iPushPull. Go to the Data ribbon and choose Get External Data and then From Web. This will open the New Web Query window. Enter the URL to the page and click Go to display it.

On our source page, we simply choose the data we’re interested in by selecting it. We’re going to choose the stock indices tables to import. Then we simply click Import to create the web query and the data from the page will be pulled into our workbook.

That’s our web query created, but at the moment the data is static; it won’t update until Refresh is clicked. Fortunately, Excel makes it easy for us to make the query update automatically. Choose Connections from the Data ribbon, select the only connection and click Properties. Here we can set the query to update every minute. While we’re at it, we’ll give it a more informative name than ‘connection’ – useful if you have many queries in a single work book.

Now that the prices are live in Excel, it’s simply a matter of using our =iPush(…) worksheet function to automatically push the range to a live iPushPull data page, like this one.

You can use this page as it is, if you like, and link to it from your website. But a neater approach is to use our WordPress plug-in to embed the live data in any web page, just like this:

Pretty neat. And don’t worry if you aren’t using WordPress to manage your site – if you choose the Embed Page option from the iPushPull website, you can get an iframe that you can use in any web page.

Remember, stock market prices are just an example. You can use this technique for any type of data. What about live weather and traffic information for your event website? Or live sales figures on your corporate intranet? All the data is out there, you just need to use it.

Download the sample workbook.

April 19, 2016April 19, 2016

Google Sheets and Excel Online vs iPushPull – Why choose iPushPull?

We’re often asked about the differences between iPushPull vs Google Sheets and Excel Online. The Google and Microsoft applications attempt to replicate desktop spreadsheets but offer vastly reduced functionality and integration. And they don’t tackle the data security and access control issues that face all users who share spreadsheets with their colleagues and clients. In this respect, web-hosted sheets are not much better than a spreadsheet saved on a shared drive.

We decided to think different. We wanted to let our customers retain all the features of their desktop applications but also give them the convenience of cloud access to their data. So we built iPushPull.

Google Sheets and Excel Online vs iPushPull: Share your data without compromising on functionality

iPushPull integrates directly with your desktop Microsoft Excel, so you retain all the features of the desktop application and can continue to use your local database links, live feeds and custom macros. iPushPull lets you share some or all of the data from your sheet with whoever you choose, wherever they are. And because you’re still using your full desktop application you can still see your data when you don’t have web access – for example, when you’re on the train.

Your latest LIVE data available on any device

Whether the data in your desktop Excel spreadsheet is entered manually, updated by a live feed or imported from a local ERP or CRM system, iPushPull lets you share it with other Excel users and view it on the web or mobile. iPushPull can be easily integrated into any website – we’ve even developed a highly-rated plugin for WordPress-powered sites.

Once you’ve started sharing data from your spreadsheets, iPushPull will be updated every time your data changes – there’s no need to save your sheet. Your colleagues and clients will see the data update live in their spreadsheets or on any mobile device. There’s no need to reopen the file or hit refresh.

Superior access control

When you share a Google or Excel spreadsheet with someone, they get access to all the data contained within it. iPushPull lets you control access at the sheet, range or even at the individual cell level. So you can choose to share just the critical information from your sheet with the individuals or groups of people who need to see it, with no chance of over-sharing.

Complete security – spreadsheet data encrypted from end-to-end

Google Sheets and Excel Online are basically files stored on a cloud service. As such, they’re vulnerable to the kind of security breaches which have, sadly, become a regular occurrence. iPushPull lets you encrypt your data before it leaves your device, so it’s totally secure until it reaches the intended recipient. We can’t read your data, or give anyone else access to it, even if we wanted to! And we have some exciting developments in the pipeline that will give you even greater control over where, when and by whom your data can be accessed.

Consolidate and summarise data from across your business and customer base

iPushPull lets you pull data from multiple remote spreadsheets and mobile devices into a single sheet, automatically. It’s easy to build summary reports using data from across your business, regardless of where the data was entered or the application used to enter it. You don’t need a developer to create your own user-focussed B2B or B2C applications scaling to 10s, 100s or even 1000s of users. This just isn’t possible with web-hosted sheets.

Share data across all the applications you use – even using SMS

The iPushPull Excel Add-In works with all versions of desktop Microsoft Excel from 2007 to 2016. You can also access your data with our desktop and mobile websites (and with our upcoming Google Sheets add-in and Android and iOS apps, too). And when you’re not connected to the internet, you can even push and pull your data using SMS. When you’re using Google Sheets or Office 365 you’re locked into a walled garden.

iPushPull gives you desktop functionality, cloud connectivity, mobile access and enterprise-grade permissioning, security and encryption.

April 7, 2016April 26, 2016

What(sapp) took you so long?

At iPushPull we take our users’ privacy and security very seriously, so we were intrigued that two of the biggest news stories to break this week relate to just that. We think it’s great that everyone is suddenly talking about encryption. Whatsapp‘s plan to incorporate Open Whisper Systems‘ TextSecure protocol for end-to-end encryption is old news, announced way back in 2014. Perhaps the most surprising about this week’s headline-grabbing roll-out is that it took so long to get here. There are significant technical hurdles to overcome when it comes to retro-fitting encryption to an existing platform, but making that additional layer of security convenient for customers to use is and even bigger challenge. Whatsapp have done a great job; most of their billion or so users won’t even be be aware of it. In fact, it’s so seamlessly integrated they had to put a message in the app to let people know it’s there.

Whatsapp end-to-end encryption to Panama Papers

What’s really interesting about the Whatsapp story is that, not only is end-to-end encryption enabled by default, there is no way to opt out and turn it off. It’s a clear statement of intent from Whatsapp that they believe this is the new minimum benchmark for privacy and security.

At iPushPull we designed security from the outset and we always at the forefront of our considerations when designing and developing the platform. We’ve had end-to-end encryption since we started in 2014, but we don’t make it compulsory. We allow our users to enable it on a page-by-page basis, whenever they like, and adjust those settings as their privacy needs change. A new, more intuitive user interface is already in development which we hope will open encryption for spreadsheets to the masses in the same way Whatsapp has done for messages. Just as we strive to let our users take control of their content, we believe that they should have the tools to take control of the security of that content too.

This brings us neatly to the biggest news story of the week: The Panama Papers. Whatever you think about the morals of Mossack Fonseca and some of their customers (and as others have noted, there are genuine reasons for using the services they offer), there is no doubt that it represents a massive failure of corporate and data security. How many other corporations are at risk of a similar leak; how many of those corporations hold information about you?

No matter how seriously an organisation takes data security or how well they think it is implemented, it’s all for nothing if employees are circumventing it by, for example, emailing documents to clients or putting them in their personal cloud storage to work on at home.

There are smarter and more secure ways to share your business or personal content of course. That’s what we do here at iPushPull. Register for free today and start taking control of your privacy?

March 10, 2016March 15, 2016

Excel Add-In for iPushPull: Download our new version now

We’ve been working hard here at iPushPull developing a host of exciting new features to help you get the most out of our Microsoft Excel Add-In. It’s available to download now for registered users. If you haven’t already registered, why not do it now (it’s free!)?

Download the latest Excel Add-In for iPushPull Now

What’s new with the latest version of Excel Add-In

Our new ribbon makes finding your pages and sharing Excel content a breeze. Search and preview pages before pushing or pulling

Insert live pushes and pulls as new worksheets in your existing workbooks and automatically overlay web formatting over a live pull

New ‘URL’ option for our =iPullDisplayInfo(...) worksheet function allows you to create clickable links from your spreadsheets to iPushPull pages

New =iPullTime(...) worksheet function allows you to control exactly when your live pushes occur and reliably push cells containing volatile functions

Share Excel Charts Online

Charts! You can now share Excel charts online by pushing them to an iPushPull page just as you would any other Excel range, and even include them in a wordpress site just like this one:

We’ve added support for Excel 2016 and high-resolution displays

Vertical alignment added to cell formatting

There’s a lot more to discover too, so why not download it now and check out our support site for more information, tutorials, and videos. Want to know more about our popular WordPress plug-in? You can find out all about it here: Embed live Excel spreadsheets in web pages using our Free WordPress Plugin

About iPushPull

iPushPull‘s services enable its customers to securely share live data between desktop applications like Microsoft Excel, and distribute documents and research on a fully access-controlled and audited platform. With iPushPull’s Research Delivery Platform you can take control of your research distribution. To date, it has won two UK Government grants for its innovative research and development work.

February 26, 2016February 9, 2018

Financial Trading Conferences and Events in London

What are some of the trends in technology driven financial trading? We have put together a list of must attend events and conferences in London during 2016 for traders who are planning to stay up-to-date with new technologies and stay competitive in this ever-changing environment. From lending to cashless payments and digital currencies Fintech has been a thorn in the side of the banking industry and continues to do so. Institutional traders in the financial markets have become increasingly wary of the growing retail trading volumes which now play a significant proportion of global trades.

How human traders will beat the machines?

Here is a very intriguing article on the FT.com about How human traders will beat the machines. What do you think? Will the advancement of computer-driven trading systems sow the seeds of their eventual obsolescence? Miles Johnson starts a great discussion about how investment firms race to create a thinking, trading computer but concludes that the truly skilled fund manager has no need to worry…..yet. This is a great time to be in the heart of the financial capital, the City of London, and if you would like to keep up-to-date with new financial trading technologies then take a look at the list of Financial Trading Events and Conferences that are happening in London this year.

London Fintech Capital of Europe

London’s FinTech investment boom was emphasised one more time by Accenture’s The Future of Fintech and Banking report in last March. Investment across the globe trebled from $928m in 2008 to a staggering $2.97bn in 2013, more than four times the rate of overall VC investment. The UK, and London in particular, has seen deal volume grow at an annualised rate of 74%, compared to 27% globally and 13% in Silicon Valley. London, once again is recognised as the FinTech Capital of Europe.

Author: David Jones