Katya Mironova – ipushpull

May 27, 2021May 28, 2021

Data-as-a-Service in a Data-Centric World

We live in an increasingly data-driven world. In no industry is this more apparent than in financial services, in which data drives decision-making in microseconds. Decisions made on the basis of time-critical data not only affect the firm or individual executing a trade but also the wider financial markets and, in some instances, entire economies.

The introduction of regulatory requirements for the publication of pre- and post-trade pricing and execution data by a wide range of trading firms has led to a proliferation of data available for asset classes that have historically only traded over the counter. Regulation now demands this of every bank and investment firm.

Data-as-a-Service and Data Providers

Providers have evolved to drive and support our increasingly data-driven financial markets. And it is becoming increasingly apparent to all players that they are not just delivering services to their own clients. Instead, they are part of a longer value chain, in which the services that they offer enable their clients to provide better services onwards to their clients. Improving that all-important “last mile” of delivery has knock-on impacts as consumers along the chain are better able to innovate and to deliver improved services onwards.

Data-as-a-Service is a key trend in a data-centric world. A data-driven view of the world in which you have domain experts threading the needle from the data creation all the way to data consumption “is a very, very valuable way of actually realising true data value from a business perspective”, says James Tromans, a Technical Director in the Office of the CTO at Google Cloud. The data consumed and used by trading firms must be high quality and in the appropriate format for the task at hand. Data used for pricing, decision-making and execution must be relayed to the place where it is needed in the timescale appropriate for a given asset class.

For providers of data-driven services, effectively integrating their offering into their clients’ ever-evolving workflow environment remains one of the greatest challenges but also one of the biggest opportunities. The “last mile” of delivery – the integration of data into the workflows of the clients who consume it – is often the last thing on the minds of data producers while it is top-of-mind for data consumers. From a client’s perspective, it can be the key differentiator.

For companies like Morningstar, it is the ingestion and integration of data from external sources – whether exchanges or other third parties – into their own environment, so that they can produce their own data services, that matters. For them, a solution such as ipushpull opens up opportunities to deliver greater value to clients by removing the barriers to accessing more data sources.

ULTUMUS meanwhile provides Data-as-a-Service but aimed at the enterprise, and a solution such as ipushpull gives them the capability to provide the data functionality in a way that meets the needs of traders as well, but within a licensed and permissioned structure.

Clients are increasingly opting for data services which can be delivered into their existing workflow tools of choice so that they can seamlessly integrate and automate. A new breed of FinTechs sit at the forefront of this trend by offering powerful, fast-to-market solutions incorporating technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. These solutions integrate seamlessly into their clients (and clients of clients) existing workflow tools, removing barriers to client on-boarding and integration. ipushpull, for example, enables data service providers to automate their data-driven workflows, freeing them up from the “last mile” of delivery to focus on their core value propositions.

In the financial markets of today, availability of – and access to – data on its own is only part of the challenge. That “last mile” of data delivery – enabling data to be efficiently, effectively and quickly consumed by applications and users across an organisation precisely when they need it – now gives data service providers that all-important competitive advantage.

WEBINAR

Data-as-a-Service: Delivered live and seamlessly into your client workflows

9th June, 16:00 BST / 11:00 EDT

REGISTER HERE

For brokers, banks, and providers of data-driven services, effectively integrating your offering into your clients’ ever-evolving workflow environment remains one of the greatest challenges but also one of the biggest opportunities. We will explore the burden of the last mile of delivery and what can be done to greatly improve the client experience.

Interested to hear more from Google, Morningstar, Ultumus and Parameta Solutions on this topic? Why not register now for a webinar we’re hosting on the 9th June, 16:00 BST / 11:00 EDT.

REGISTER HERE

May 26, 2021June 17, 2021

BNP Paribas Digitises Pre-trade Client Workflows

ipushpull’s PPQ delivers enhanced efficiency for buy and sell-side firms for non-standard, complex trades.

London, UK – May 2021: ipushpull, the real-time data sharing and workflow platform today announced that BNP Paribas, a leading global investment bank, have implemented PPQ standardised messaging to streamline their manual workflow around non-standard, complex trades, for their global asset manager community. PPQ has been designed to deliver enhanced efficiency, reduce operational and compliance risk and support trade negotiation.

Many buy-side firms have long highlighted the gap in the market for a way of digitising complex transactions between asset managers and sell side firms. For example, LDI trading and other complex workflows require a combination of digital and voice trading interactions in addition to tasks performed using chat, email and Excel spreadsheets. This also includes the need to streamline manual processes and operational risk associated with emails, file sharing and copy-paste, as well as providing quick and efficient responses.

PPQ is a pre-trade syntax which standardises and facilitates the negotiation process between the buy and sell side through a set of integrated data sharing and data-driven tools. It uses financial networks like Symphony to deliver the standardised syntax within private bilateral chats to allow trading and sales to communicate detailed information.

Chatbots can interpret key data within those messages, display them within a custom application and allow the end user to drive the workflow from a single screen. Data mapping transforms incoming and outgoing data into the required format, creating an extensible solution to interoperate between new and existing standards. The inclusion of structured data objects within messages, containing instrument definitions, event descriptions and a wealth of other metadata, can further aid automation of pre-trade workflow.

Ben Harvey, Senior LDI & Macro Rates Sales from BNP Paribas noted “As a bank that is continuously innovating our technology and processes to enhance our client’s experiences, we are pleased to integrate data-driven automation to support our sales organisation in delivering service excellence.” Harvey added “Complex derivatives are the next area where we are focused on process automation and improvement. This also underlines our approach to the next generation dealing room and to further develop the non-price element of our customer offering.”

Matthew Cheung, CEO from ipushpull commented “We are delighted to see the positive impact that PPQ has had on BNP Paribas’ operational workflow and risk mitigation. Our unified modular and cloud-based approach enabled us to rapidly deliver this solution into production and provide quantifiable benefits.”

About ipushpull
ipushpull is a leading capital market FinTech firm that connects people, data and applications in real-time. We make sharing seamless by eliminating silos of data sitting in emails, spreadsheets or file shares and integrate that data into structured workflows.

Data drives financial markets however data sharing has hardly changed for decades. Our goal is to improve human decision making by reducing the heavy lifting around complex manual repetitive tasks, allowing people to focus on value-add activity.

For more information visit www.ipushpull.com.

Contacts

ipushpull

Matthew Cheung

CEO

info@ipushpull.com

+44 20 3808 4085

Media contact

The Realization Group

Melanie Budden

Melanie.budden@therealizationgroup.com

+44 7974 937970

April 7, 2021April 8, 2021

Enhancing chat through standardisation of data

The importance of technology and data connectivity was highlighted a year ago in March 2020 when the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in the Vix, which is also known as Wall Street’s fear gauge, reaching levels that were even higher than during the financial crisis in 2008. Staff had to deal with extremely high volumes while working from home and there has since been an acceleration in the digitisation of workflow to cope with the inefficiencies and inconveniences of remote working. Firms have needed better data in order to become more efficient and continue to serve their customers.

Standardisation of data – one syntax

However, where dealers are still carrying out pre-trade negotiations over voice and chat there are often manual processes for recording quote data. By taking the heavy lifting away –the copy and paste, the rekeying, the robotic tasks – that employees do every day you free them up to do the tasks you want your humans to do – spark conversation, cultivate relationships, generate ideas and create revenue. Standardised syntax means you can rely on a set format and build technology to use those messages. This helps automate the repetitive processes to avoid failures. This could be something as simple as recognising a pricing request and pushing notifications out to the involved parties.

Standardisation of data and syntax also drives automation and whilst we look towards global uptake of these standards an interim state can still offer more efficient, safer processes that lead towards full electronification. Where standards are not adopted across the board there exists the ability to develop a translation layer so that both sides can use their native formats but still understand their counterparts requests and responses. When you can connect data sitting in existing tools and applications you can build data-driven workflows on top of that data. You are unbundling the data that was in spreadsheets, file shares, voice and chat and giving it a structure. That workflow becomes easy to record, auditable, trackable but more importantly it’s real-time and collaborative. Everyone sees the same real-time data and can interact with it and make decisions on it at the same time. This doesn’t just mean sales and traders but across the organisation as a whole – from compliance to operations to finance, legal and beyond. In order to analyse client relationships and focus on improvements for mutual gain you need a high quality, consistent, agreed data set to work from. That will only exist when you record your interactions accurately and at all stages of the process.

Artificial Intelligence

For the buyside to fully leverage value contained in their data its essential to bring Artificial Intelligence into the workflow to present insights and opportunities based on data that AI has processed. This means we preserve the human interaction, whilst leveraging automation and ultimately allowing the trader to make a better decision – the trader will no longer interface with the data directly but with the possibilities of the AI processing the data.

ipushpull has recently launched PPQ (Pushpull Quotes), which standardises and automates the negotiation process to help both the buy and sell side achieve these aims. PPQ fits within existing workflows so neither the client or their counterparties need to install a new system. Trading and sales can enhance chat by communicating pricing information in private bilateral conversations more quickly and efficiently using a standardised syntax. Chatbots interpret key features within the standardised data and display customised information on the desktop so the user can manage their workflow from just one screen. Standardised syntax also allows bots to take on the heavy lifting of repetitive administrative tasks so trading and sales can minimise operational risk by removing manual touchpoints.

If you would like to know more about standardisation of data, feel free to get in touch.

February 11, 2021February 11, 2021

Regulators Focus On Compliance as Sales and Traders’ Workflows Remain Under Scrutiny

Firms that use automation and data-as-a-service will be better able to meet regulatory requirements as regulators focus in on sales and traders’ workflows.

When the coronavirus first appeared at the beginning of 2020 few people imagined that its effects would continue to be felt nearly a year later. The pandemic caused a dramatic shift in working practices globally. Many chief executives have since predicted that a hybrid model will continue with staff having the flexibility to partly work from home, rather than being permanently in the office. This has caused, and will continue to cause, challenges for regulated financial firms who are required to monitor the conduct of front office staff in capital markets, even when they are working remotely.

Initially the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) temporarily waived some of its supervisory rules in the US. However, as working from home has become the norm, the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has this year stressed the need for controls as risks from misconduct may be heightened or increased.

The regulator highlighted that these risks include increased use of unmonitored and/or encrypted platforms such as WhatsApp for sharing potentially sensitive information connected with work. Even without regulatory involvement, firms themselves have been taking action when staff have broken the rules. For example, two senior commodities traders lost their jobs last year just for using WhatsApp after an internal investigation at Morgan Stanley last year.

Matthew Cheung, CEO of ipushpull explains, “Helped by the need to work remotely, we are seeing a massive acceleration of digitisation in capital markets. A convergence of live data sharing, chatbots and cloud means pre-trade workflow for non-standard complex trades can now be streamlined and conducted from anywhere.”

Automating sales and traders’ workflows

The FCA said it has acted against individuals and firms for misconduct which involved the use of WhatsApp and other social media platforms to arrange deals, including transmitting lists of trades to copy. The regulator has sought orders preventing such individuals from carrying out these activities in the future as it views these actions as serious. The FCA highlighted that it expects this to remain an area of focus, so firms need to take notice.

One way of helping front office staff comply with the regulations is to ensure that data is easily accessible from home through providing corporate VPNs and making workflows as automated as possible via use of the cloud.

Surveillance can be particularly challenging in markets where the majority of trades are still negotiated by front office personnel by voice. Firms are concerned about how they track chat/voice and its lack of immediacy as conversations may only be monitored or transcribed once a day. The industry is looking to overcome these challenges in a variety of ways.

For example, Morgan Stanley is investigating how to automatically convert chats into request for quotes in credit markets. The use of Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) solutions allows technology, such as bots, to identify information such as prices from free-form chat messages or voice conversations. ipushpull can extract data in various formats from applications that firms are already using, and deliver it to the right place so it is integrated into their existing processes.

The data becomes structured and can be viewed by authorised personnel in real time, who could include audit and compliance, in real time. Surveillance can be performed far more efficiently as messages or conversations are automatically linked to workflows, rather than staff having to decipher recordings or transcripts of phone calls or messages.

In addition to monitoring the negotiation of trades, regulated firms need to show that they can continue to identify unusual trading patterns, despite staff working from home. For example, if a certain client always gets a better price or if the price of a deal is suspicious. Such surveillance can also be carried out much more efficiently with increased automation.

As a result the coronavirus has led to an increased investment in technology. A recent Deloitte survey found that the pandemic has clearly accelerated digital transformation in financial services with cloud computing and storage and data analytics among the top spending priorities.

Author: Neil Weatherall

Download “Fintech’s Next Frontier: Data-as-a-Service” our Financial Markets Insights report. In collaboration with Natwest Markets, Maystreet, Euromoney TRADEDATA and Engine, part of The Investment Association, ipushpull explores the importance of Data-as-a-Service in facilitating remote working and accelerating digital initiatives within the financial markets industry.

February 9, 2021May 28, 2021

Natwest Markets Trading Desk Adopt PPQ from ipushpull

ipushpull launch PPQ workflow solution, now adopted by NatWest Markets and hire former head of GBP Inflation Trading

London, UK – 09 January 2021: ipushpull, the live data sharing and real-time workflow automation platform, are delighted to announce that Natwest Markets have implemented their newly launched PPQ (Pushpull Quotes) workflow solution that streamlines manual workflow around non-standard, complex negotiations. At the same time Neil Weatherall has been hired to lead technical sales and PPQ product development.

PPQ is a pre-trade workflow tool which standardises and automates the negotiation process between buy and sell side. Using financial networks like Symphony and standardised syntax within private bilateral chats to allow trading and sales to communicate in a better way.

Chatbots can interpret key data within those messages, display them within a custom application and allow the user to drive the workflow from a single screen. Data mapping transforms incoming and outgoing data into the required format, creating an extensible solution to interoperate between new and existing standards. The inclusion of structured data objects within messages, containing instrument definitions, event descriptions and a wealth of other metadata, can further aid automation of pre-trade workflow.

Natwest Markets plus a further three top tier banks and one of the largest UK asset managers are already using PPQ and with a strong pipeline of interest, including further customers expected to adopt PPQ early in 2021.

Matthew Cheung, CEO of ipushpull, comments:
“We are seeing a massive acceleration of digitisation in capital markets. A convergence of live data sharing, chatbots and cloud means pre-trade workflow for non-standard complex trades can now be streamlined. ipushpull allows both buy side and sell side to take advantage of this.”

Neil Weatherall has joined Pushpull Technology following a long career with Natwest Markets and RBC Capital Markets. Neil started his career at Natwest in 2002 and went on to become Head of GBP Inflation. Rapid growth in the LDI industry and hedging programmes saw trade volumes increase exponentially across a diverse client base and as a result Neil has overseen large scale changes in the technology employed to price, book and manage trades.

Neil Weatherall, Head of Technical Sales, ipushpull, adds:
“I’m excited to join ipushpull at such a time of momentous change in working practices across financial markets. Eliminating manual processes, creating standardisation and improving efficiency are paramount. There are a significant number of complex instruments or package trades where the Pre-trade negotiation process is ripe for digitising and enhancing through our PPQ service. I’m looking forward to helping our clients move towards frictionless and seamless workflows, providing higher quality data and intelligence around their trading activities.”

About ipushpull
ipushpull are a capital markets fintech providing a live data sharing and workflow automation platform. Solving for the complexity around data sharing – we unbundle data sitting in emails, spreadsheets or file shares and bring that data back together into a structured workflow alongside manual tasks previously spread across different applications. Data drives financial markets however data sharing has hardly changed for decades. Our goal is to improve human decision making by taking the heavy lifting and manual administrative tasks away and leave people to do the things only people can do.

For more information visit www.ipushpull.com.

Contacts

ipushpull

Matthew Cheung

CEO

info@ipushpull.com

+44 20 3808 4085

Media contact – The Realization Group

Melanie Budden

Melanie.budden@therealizationgroup.com

+44 7974 937970

December 3, 2020

Digitisation of Pre-Trade Client Workflows

Streamlining workflow for sales and trading desks

Although some areas within capital markets benefit from the efficiencies of electronic trading, the more complex and less liquid instruments still involve a great deal of manual, unstructured pre-trade activity. This creates friction (summarised in this SIFMA report), which is bad for client services, increases costs for both the buy side and the sell side, hampers liquidity and creates unnecessary operational risk, which arguably feeds into systemic risk at an industry level.

Can these issues be addressed by bringing more standardisation and automation to the market, particularly around pre-trade client workflows?

This was the topic of an online panel discussion hosted by The Realization Group and ipushpull on Tuesday 17th November, 2020. The webinar was led by Clive Posselt of The Realization Group, and featured Andy Mosson, Head of Strategic Partnerships, FICC eCommerce Sales, J.P. Morgan; Ayaz Haji, Head of Enterprise Reference Data, Goldman Sachs; Richard Turner, Senior Trader, Insight Investment; Craig Butterworth, Global Head of Sales & Account Management, Symphony; Andy Ross, CEO, CurveGlobal; Chris Scott, Senior Product Manager, TP-ICAP; and Matthew Cheung, CEO, ipushpull.

Spreadsheets on the trading floor

There are many inefficiencies resulting from over-reliance on manual processes and the continued use of e-mail, spreadsheets and copy & paste in pre-trade, particularly for non-standardised instruments traded bi-laterally via voice or chat. These manual processes are not only slow and cumbersome, they are also inherently risky and do not add much value from a trading perspective.

Messaging standards such as FIX and FpML can work well for simple products traded on electronic markets. But for more complex instruments, the various parameters of the trade are often not easily expressed in a machine-readable and understandable way.

And the inefficiencies persist across the entire pre-trade lifecycle for both the buy-side and the sell-side, impacting price discovery, negotiation, execution and booking of trades.

Spreadsheets are the common standard denominator and remain ubiquitous on the trading desk, because a) they serve a useful purpose and b) they can be quickly deployed. Firms that are constrained in their development resources have to be very selective about where those resources are assigned, and it is generally much quicker and easier for someone with business subject matter expertise to solve a problem by creating an Excel spreadsheet than to wait for a solution to be developed in-house. The issue with such spreadsheets and workarounds however, is that they are not standardised and they do not scale.

Towards a standardised approach

There is no shortage of potential solutions designed to help automate pre-trade workflow, both from established vendors and newer fintechs. However, the problem with many of these is that although they provide incrementally better tooling, they are still point solutions. The wider mission is to cohesively bring together some of these tools to leverage a common secure and compliant collaboration platform, to create standardisation at an industry level, where the buy side, sell side, exchanges, clearing houses, vendors and service providers all benefit from the network effect.

FIX is a good example of a well-governed, well-accepted protocol that has been widely used across the industry for some time. More recently, bodies like FINOS are creating standards for desktop workflow, enabling standardised tools that previously might have taken years to build, to be deployed in weeks or months. There are also situations where firms just get together and create what becomes a de-facto standard.

As these standards improve and become more widely adopted, they enable greater workflow automation. Fintechs, utilising tools like data mapping, allow firms to create a data-led approach and a more efficient client-focused process, thus providing the ability for firms to interoperate between all of these different types of standards and approaches, so that they can communicate seamlessly.

Financial institutions can leverage this technology to drive efficiency with the least amount of disruption to workflow, improving their speed to market and building and deploying bespoke solutions that no one else has, thus creating competitive advantage.

Impact of COVID-19

The onset of COVID-19 and the resulting increase in remote flexible working has certainly accelerated digitalisation initiatives. Anecdotally, there has been more digital transformation in the past eight months than in the last eight years. Long held biases against working from home have been disproved by necessity and highlighted the need for firms to have a coherent omni-channel strategy.

In this current environment, end users need to be able to seamlessly switch between multiple different communication channels as it suits them, by having device and data interoperability. But with the financial services industry being so heavily regulated, the challenge is enabling that whilst still maintaining the strictest levels of compliance and security.

The goal therefore, is to be able to take communication that historically might have been siloed or non-compliant, and funnel it through a more comprehensive, standardised platform that addresses those shortcomings, and at the same time meshes them into a broader workflow digitalisation strategy.

The rapid transformation we have seen due to COVID, converging with a thriving capital markets fintech ecosystem, has led to an increased demand for solutions that can unbundle the legacy data – spreadsheets, emails, file share, voice, and chat – and rebundle it together with the tasks that were spread across different applications, into new structured workflows.

Future State of pre-trade workflow

The future state of pre-trade technology is a world where instead of having highly paid professionals doing robotic tasks, we can instead combine the human and the machine conversations, the messages and the data, eliminate manual processes and improve efficiency by creating and adopting standardisation.

The ultimate goal for most technology providers is to free up traders and sales people to do the things that only humans can do, i.e. discuss the markets, give opinion, and create value, using new, live, collaborative, interoperating tools.

The industry now needs to address its legacy silos and re-engineer its manual pre-trade processes, with a mindset of delivering an improved experience, better internal efficiency and, at the same time, a significant reduction in operational risk.

On-demand Webinar & Report: Digitisation of Pre-trade Client Workflows

Learn how J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Insight Investment and TP-ICAP are approaching the digitisation of pre-trade client workflows.

Understand how market infrastructure providers like CurveGlobal, Symphony and ipushpull are facilitating this by improving price discovery and building liquidity through standardisation, automation and live data.

GET YOUR COPY

August 18, 2020April 14, 2021

Moving towards future state in capital markets – The Financial Technologist

It’s a very wide spectrum in capital markets between legacy user environments at one end and the equivalent of the SpaceX Dragon 2 mission and its recent launch at the other, where automation is center stage. There is a lot that firms can be doing today to move towards the latter, especially as fast evolving consumer products set a precedent for other industries. The number of growing millennials in capital markets who are taking up senior positions expect technology in office environments to offer regular improvements and functionality updates as standard. The future state in capital markets is evolving.

Areas which before were considered a nice to have, are becoming the new norm in the dynamic that the COVID pandemic created. Standardization and aggregation of data, multi-application interoperability and reducing the overall screen real estate are becoming essential in the migration to the new environment.

There is one component for many users across the front, middle and back office which is even more often used than Bloomberg, one that has achieved notoriety – Microsoft Excel. An integration of this component is key, whether between users, chat apps or an ecosystem of other applications which can be used to further workflow.

How can we build a better user experience? How can traders optimize their workflow in and out of the office? What is the best way to collaborate on data between departments and locations?

Find out more in the interview by Matthew Cheung in The Financial Technologist ‘Phoenix’ out now.

Tune in to hear more on “Creating a Blueprint for Pandemic Recovery in Financial Technology” webinar on 19^th August at 5pm BST, where Matthew Cheung and an expert panel will be discussing the topic in more detail.

August 6, 2020August 6, 2020

Using Data-as-a-Service to Accelerate Digital Initiatives

Financial markets firms are increasingly capitalising on their data by taking advantage of cloud-based technologies that enable them to seamlessly connect with desktop applications. In a recent webinar, industry experts discussed how Data-as-a-Service enhances client experience, widens digital distribution channels and provides better workflow efficiency and automation for end-users.

Microsoft reported a record fiscal year in July 2020 with commercial cloud revenues surpassing $50bn for the first time, an increase of more than a third from a year ago. Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft, said on the earnings call that the previous five months had shown that digital technology intensity is key to business resilience. Nadella said: “Organisations that build their own digital capability will recover faster and emerge from this crisis stronger. We are seeing businesses accelerate the digitisation of every part of their operations to reimagine how they meet customer needs.”

Financial services firms have needed to digitise as Covid-19 has forced working from home while maintaining the same service to their clients. The Realization Group hosted a webinar in July 2020 with a panel of experts to discuss how firms of all sizes, from the sell side to the buy side, can use Data-as-a-Service to emerge better, faster and stronger in the post-pandemic world.

Data sharing in capital markets has historically been a very manual process, involving emails, file sharing and copy and pasting. Matthew Cheung, chief executive of ipushpull, explained that Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) allows firms to automate this process and seamlessly connect their data to their clients while providing the first or last mile of connectivity to end-user applications.

The fintech ‘pulls’ the required information from a database, a platform or even a spreadsheet and ‘pushes’ it to recipients in applications they already use, such as Excel spreadsheets or a chat platform. Clients will have preferences on whether that data is live, streaming or on-demand and DaaS can also meet the capital markets regulatory requirements of security controls and audit trails.

“The cloud is an enabling technology so Data-as-a-Service allows firms to share data in any application and it is all plug-and-play,” Cheung added. “Covid-19 has accelerated cloud adoption and digital transformation projects across markets.”

This was backed up by a poll which found that the vast majority of the audience, 85%, had heard of DaaS. In addition, Covid-19 was the top factor driving their firm’s digital transformation with 30% of the vote.

Capital markets firms have traditionally built their own technology but John Macpherson, deputy chair of the Investment Association’s advisory panel for Engine, a fintech accelerator for the asset management industry, said that ship has sailed. More than half, 58%, of the audience agreed as they said they would buy, rather than build, DaaS technology.

Macpherson added: “The buy side very much looks at DaaS as a cost-efficient responsive service that allows them to focus on selling their products.”

Data-as-a-Service also creates a faster path to innovation, giving firms a more agile decision making process and a more data-driven culture which lowers risk and leads to higher revenues.

“Once these dots are connected DaaS will become more prevalent,” said Macpherson. “There are phenomenal opportunities from getting the right data at the right moment in the right format so that people can make better decisions.”

Patrick Flannery, co-founder and chief executive of data infrastructure provider MayStreet, broke down the four stages of using data effectively – collection, storage, transformation and delivery. Each stage presents a challenge, for example, storing large amounts of data can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in each region. Flannery said: “Firms will have an ocean of unstructured data. They need to pull out the relevant piece and then integrate it into their downstream workflow. Giving it a go themselves may actually give them a first-hand view of the resources needed to do it right and push them into the direction of DaaS.”

Julien Dugat, fixed income client execution platforms and digital sales at NatWest Markets, explained that the main reason the bank chose to use ipushpull, rather than build, was the speed to market of using an off-the-shelf product.

“You don’t need to spend ages customising the product and integrating it with your own data feed, so you can get going really quickly”, Dugat added.

NatWest Markets uses electronic venues’ FIX API’s and ipushpull to distribute tens of thousands of daily axes to clients more efficiently than through phone calls or emails. Automating the process means the axes are always up-to-date, actionable, relevant and easy to access by clients. The bank sends a stream of live data to the ipushpull cloud and clients can pull the data in their preferred format, such as Excel or a Symphony chat. The majority of the audience, 63%, said they would prefer to use Data-as-a-Service through APIs, followed by Excel and then Symphony apps and bots.

Dugat said: “Clients don’t need to install anything on their desktop but can, for example, access our data through Symphony or the ipushpull web app or mobile app so it is a very low barrier to entry.”

The NatWest sales desks also use ipushpull to easily send highly targeted relevant axes to specific clients. A client may want auto sector bonds, and the salesperson can filter the axes and send them by clicking one button. Clients can also trade axes more efficiently as the bank has integrated ipushpull with SCOUT, an execution bot in Symphony.

Dugat said: “It is about getting the right data to the right person at the right time. Rather than just inundating everybody with lots of data, we make it relevant.”

Mark Woolfenden, managing director of futures and options reference data supplier Euromoney TRADEDATA highlighted that DaaS provides opportunities for small and medium-sized firms to access the same high-quality data as large firms, as they would be able to pay just for the data they used.

“More flexible business models could include offering data on-demand as part of the trade lifecycle from pre-trade risk validation to post-trade regulatory compliance and portfolio management,” Woolfenden added.

Cheung concluded that he expects digitisation and DaaS to become more common. He said: “Moving to this new way of data sharing unlocks efficiency and automation, so humans can spend time on higher-value tasks.”

Contact ipushpull at sales@ipushpull.com for further information or for a live demo of Data-as-a-Service in action.

June 25, 2020July 9, 2020

Enabling Data-as-a-Service on Legacy Platforms

In a previous blog, we wrote about the competitive edge that data-rich financial institutions and solution vendors can gain by offering ‘Data-as-a-Service‘.

But what are some of the key considerations when it comes to cloud-enabling a firm’s existing legacy platforms? How difficult is it to offer live data or real-time data sharing through commonly used desktop apps such as Excel?

A bank, broker or asset manager might want to take on-premise data that sits on an internal platform – trade data for example – and seamlessly share that to the cloud, thus removing the need for end users to be onsite or to remote desktop in via a VPN.

Or a solution vendor with products designed for on-premise installation or access via dedicated lines and specific client software, might wish to go cloud-based in order to offer real-time or on-demand data sharing into existing applications and workflows without its customers having to rely on clunky FTP or building to APIs.

The good news is that enabling Data-as-a-Service on these legacy platforms is not as difficult as it might seem.

Enabling Data-as-a-Service on Legacy Platforms –

Real-time data sharing in the real world

Amongst financial institutions, many firms, on both the buy side and the sell side, are looking to gain greater leverage from their own internal systems by cloud-enabling them, thus improving the service they offer to internal colleagues and external clients. Whether that’s through making real-time data available within chat and collaborative workflow apps, feeding live data to and from Excel or sharing data via other desktop apps, there are many benefits that such an approach offers.

A good real-world example of this is the e-commerce fixed income department of a well-known bank, which uses its own internally-developed platform to generate trade axes from its current bond inventory. Working together with ipushpull, the bank has cloud-enabled this internal platform with secure, real-time data sharing, so that customers are automatically updated with new trade axes via their own choice of desktop apps (such as Symphony or Excel) and can respond with indications of interest directly from within those apps.

From a solution vendor perspective, there are many companies that have fantastic products and services, but live data sharing is restricted by the fact that their customers need to have software installed onsite or can only access data through FTP or API integration with a centralised service. A number of these vendors are now seeing the benefits of cloud-enabling these platforms to offer Data-as-a-Service.

Again, it’s worth citing a couple of real-world examples.

The first is a risk solution vendor that offers intra-day margin calculations. They have a great product that enables customers to load up their position data and calculate span margining for those positions on the fly. However, the product was originally designed to be installed on premise at the customer’s site, which made it expensive and meant that it could only be sold to larger institutions. By working with ipushpull to create a multi-tenant version with a secure cloud presentation layer, the vendor can broaden the service out to a wider, more diverse customer base and offer more affordable subscription-based or on-demand pricing models.

The second example is a data vendor that has a centralised multi-tenant platform, where customers download large data files and upload trade files via secure FTP. Again, their legacy installation and onboarding process meant that their commercial model was limited to larger customers. ipushpull helped the vendor cloud-enable this service to make the data available on demand, which has now opened up the service to a much wider group of potential customers.

Seamless integration of data sharing tools

The common thread with all of these legacy systems is that they handle data, with a set of inputs and outputs. And there is no fundamental, technical reason why they should not be cloud-enabled with data sharing tools.

This is what ipushpull does. At the front end, we deliver these systems as true services with a unified presentation layer via the common desktop apps that people are already using. At the back end we develop APIs that plug into these legacy technologies. From the perspective of both service providers and end users, this is a completely seamless process. Services connect to ipushpull via the cloud and we take care of the rest, i.e. marshalling the data, providing access controls, presenting the data into multiple desktop apps and marshalling data back and forth to the service from within those apps in real-time.

Service providers benefit from not only being able to offer live and on-demand access through desktop apps like Excel, Slack, Symphony, Microsoft Teams and Eikon messenger, desktop containers like ChartIQ Finsemble and Openfin, and internal platforms and applications like pricing engines, risk systems and OMSs, without have to completely re-platform their existing systems, but also being able to deliver data-driven custom notifications into those apps based upon user-defined parameters.

In summary, Data-as-a-Service offers many benefits, and there is no reason that firms should be restricted to on-premise deployment or to API/SFTP integration. By working with a trusted partner such as ipushpull, firms that are looking to cloud-enable their internal platforms can minimise their internal development costs, broaden their reach and rapidly accelerate their time to market.

June 22, 2020July 7, 2020

ipushpull participates in Integrated Workflows webinar by Chart IQ

Alongside industry experts from Citi Ventures, Bloomberg, Illuminate Financial Management and ChartIQ, ipushpull participated in an “Integrated Workflows: From Nice-to-Have to Business Continuity Imperative” webinar hosted by Chart IQ, which ran on June 9^th 2020. The webinar is now available for replay here.

In the environment of the pandemic, companies continue to operate, while discovering that their investments in digitization initiatives evolved from the need to increase efficiency and effectiveness to the currently critical business continuity infrastructure. The webinar discussion focused on how banks and technology firms are collaborating to handle the global shift to working from home with next-generation digital initiatives.

You can now watch the webinar replay for an exclusive demo of how ipushpull integrates into Finsemble, Bloomberg (through Finsemble), Microsoft Teams and FIX (around 00:38 min).

“Integrated Workflows: From Nice-to-Have to Business Continuity Imperative”

About ipushpull

ipushpull is transforming data-driven workflows and improving efficiency across capital markets with real-time data sharing and workflow automation. The Data-as-a-Service platform delivers fast time-to-market and big cost savings for data producers and services across the trade lifecycle using no-code custom applications and ipushpull’s bot framework.

Find out more about ipushpull or get in touch with our sales team at sales@ipushpull.com