New Initiatives Around Standardisation and Automation in Capital Markets

By Matthew Cheung, ipushpull

In my last blog, I discussed the steps that firms can take to automate some of their pre-trade, time-critical workflows, and highlighted the advantages that such automation can offer.

However, automating these data-driven workflows in isolation within your own organisation only gets you so far. It does of course bring about some genuine efficiencies, as we’ve previously discussed. But for the industry to really move forward, we need to consider the essential role of data standardisation and automation in capital markets and generally in financial markets.

Data interoperability through open source

One area where significant progress is being made around standardisation is in the open sourcing of data platforms, allowing for data interoperability across organisations.

A real-world example of this is the recently announced launch of Legend, Goldman Sachs’ flagship data management and data governance platform, now open sourced through FINOS, The Fintech Open Source Foundation.

This is an important step for the industry, because it demonstrates how a number of leading banks (including Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley RBC Capital Markets, and others) are all working together within a shared environment, to prototype interbank collaborative data modelling and standardisation.

The pilot project – initially for FX options – was to build extensions to the Common Domain Model (CDM), developed by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA). Utilising this framework, industry participants can now use and build their own models collaboratively for a range of purposes using open-source components, and feed those back into the common standard.

In the press release announcing Legend’s launch, Goldman Sachs’ chief data officer and head of data engineering said, “We believe this new data platform is so powerful and important that we are making it available to our clients and the world fully open and free of charge as an open source platform through FINOS.”

This is a big deal, because it shows that industry competitors can actually work together to solve industry challenges. And they can do it by providing a means for market participants across the industry to collaborate and share data using standardised data models, not just in the front office, but also across the middle and back office.

A welcome development

With the current lack of common terminology and common definitions in the industry, particularly for more exotic, non-standardised instruments such as OTC derivatives, these kinds of open-source, collaborative initiatives are a very welcome development.

One of the great things about standardisation is that it makes everything easier to streamline and automate. In an ideal world, every system within every organisation would be able to read, write, and speak the same language, so that there would be no barriers; everyone would be able to seamlessly connect to everyone else, and every piece of incoming data would have the ability to automatically trigger events in connected systems.

This is in fact one of the main reasons why ipushpull exists, to give firms the means to achieve this regardless of which standards they adhere to.

But it’s great to see other examples of how the industry is moving towards this future state. And we expect to see a fairly rapid take-up of these open source standardisation initiatives, across both the buy-side and the sell-side, leading to increased automation and greater efficiencies across the board.

Find out more about Standardisation and Automation in Capital Markets, in our upcoming webinar.

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.

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November 11, 2020April 9, 2021

Automating Data-Driven Workflows in Financial Markets

By Matthew Cheung, CEO, ipushpull

In previous blogs, we have focused some of the benefits of Data-as-a-Service (DaaS), discussing how DaaS can be used to accelerate digital initiatives, for example. We’ve also discussed the practicalities of how firms can enable DaaS on their legacy platforms and the steps that data-rich firms can take to offer DaaS-based products to their clients.

In this blog, I’d like to clarify why it’s important for firms to progress from pure data distribution towards data-driven workflows in financial markets, examine some use cases, and explore the benefits that automated data-driven workflows can offer.

The need for financial markets workflow automation

As a starting point, what do we actually mean when we talk about data-driven workflows? It could be argued that all workflows – regardless of their simplicity or complexity – are data driven. Something happens (an event), resulting in new or updated information (data), which triggers an activity or a process (the workflow).

In the financial markets sector, workflows across the front, middle and back office have typically been established over a number of years. And while these workflows may serve their purpose, many entail manual processes that are inefficient, time-consuming, labour-intensive and not scalable.

This is a problem for the industry, and why greater automation is needed. Particularly in the front-office, where information tends to be time-critical. Firms may not realise how much these manual processes – acting on instructions received in chat windows, sending and receiving emails, transferring spreadsheets or other files back and forth, and so on – is hampering their ability to grow. A common attitude around existing workflows is, ‘that’s just the way things are’.

But things don’t have to be that way. And automating data-driven workflows can lead to greater efficiencies, cost savings, and higher growth potential.

So how do we get there?

The first step is recognising that data needs to be at the core of everything. What often happens at the moment with existing processes, is that they can result in multiple versions of the data (in multiple formats) residing in different places, with users needing specific applications, spreadsheets, chats or emails to support their version of the data.

In an automated data driven workflow, a golden source copy of the data sits centrally, and as it moves around, processes based upon that data are triggered automatically. So all of the workflow happens around the data. This approach is faster, more efficient, more scalable, easier to streamline and automate, easier to integrate, and there’s always a clear audit trail.

Use Cases: Data-Driven Workflows in Financial Markets

How does this work in practice? Let’s look at a few examples.

Real-time Pricing of basket trades

ipushpull is helping a leading institutional broker create automated workflows, for both the broker and its clients, around live pricing of basket trades. Previously, the workflow was a highly manual, labour-intensive process, where the client would send to the broker (via e-mail) a spreadsheet containing hundreds of lines of individual stocks, which would then have to be copy/pasted into the broker’s format for pricing, with the resulting data being copy/pasted back into the client’s spreadsheet format and e-mailed back to the client.

Although this a fairly standard workflow in the industry for pricing basket trades, it is time-consuming, error-prone and totally unscalable – there are only so many of these types of trades a broker can do in a day, given the manual effort involved.

Working with ipushpull, the broker is now automating a data-driven workflow whereby clients can push their basket directly from their spreadsheets, the stock data is recognised and mapped to the brokers format so the pricing can be rapidly generated. It is then automatically sent back to the client in Excel, with little or no manual intervention other than oversight of the process. This is enabling the broker to work much more efficiently, pricing more trades, in a more accurate and timely manner, and gaining new scalable business as a result, as well as eliminating keystroke risk.

Distributing Bond Axes

The fixed income division of a leading UK bank has created an automated workflow to send live prices for bond axes to its clients. In this case, the bank’s dealers are able to publish relevant axes with live prices in a Symphony chat window, which the client can execute directly from a chat. That then triggers a full STP process to automatically trade and update the bank’s internal systems.

Previously, this was a much more manual process, involving e-mails being sent back and forth, or copying information from other systems and applications into chat windows. Whereas what the client sees in the chat now is live, executable data that can be acted upon immediately either with a bot or direct with a sales person.

Streamlined pre-trade Workflow

The third use case is an investment management firm building automated data-driven workflow for FX options. The manual workflow they had – again, fairly standard in the industry – was that the trader would receive an instruction from a portfolio manager via their internal system, manually type that into a chat to its dealers and negotiate pricing across mulitple different counterparts.

Using ipushpull, this workflow has been streamlined removing any manual processes – any related operational risks – on the buyside.

Conclusion

The key to all of this is understanding the data, looking at the manual processes that still exist around time-critical workflows, finding the bottlenecks, and determining which processes are ripe for automation.

The good news is that the technology is now available from ipushpull to automate those processes without significant upheaval to firms’ current workflows, so users are still able to work within familiar chat and collaboration apps like Symphony and Excel Spreadsheets, but without the manual inefficiencies.

As these tools and technologies become more widely used, firms will no longer be able to remain competitive by over-reliance on manual workflows. Instead, moving to data-driven workflows will accelerate the path to a data-driven enterprise yielding significant benefits.

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.

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November 4, 2020November 24, 2020

Digitalising Financial Markets with Data-as-a-Service

How ipushpull cloud-enables firms to seamlessly share live, streaming, and on-demand data with Data-as-a-Service.

There have been many unpredicted outcomes from the current COVID-19 pandemic, but one of the more interesting ones has been the rapid acceleration of digitalisation. How rapid? Well, earlier this year, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella stated that they’d seen two years’ worth of digital transformation occur within the space of two months, something that was inconceivable at the start of the year. While IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna said “history will look back on this as the moment when the digital transformation of business and society suddenly accelerated”.

Like many other industries, the financial markets sector, with so many staff confined to working from home in 2020, has suffered severe disruption to existing workflows, forcing firms to readjust their working practices.

But with every challenge comes opportunity, and the savvier firms are looking not only at how to get through the current situation, but how they can transform their business for the better over the longer term by utilising Cloud – and specifically Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) – as an enabling technology.

What is DaaS & what can it offer?

Data-as-a-Service provides the ability to seamlessly connect your data to the right person, at the right time, in the right application. This means that you can share your data – which could be sitting in a database, in a platform, or even in a spreadsheet – with your clients, your counterparties, or your colleagues, directly into applications they’re already using. Excel spreadsheets, chat platforms, chatbots, even internal platforms via an API, for example.

ipushpull’s approach to DaaS is to integrate into both legacy and cloud-based technologies, enabling firms to access and share live, streaming, and on-demand data across the entire trade lifecycle, from the front office through to the middle and back office.

To offer a few examples, live data might be an investment bank distributing live ‘high touch’ bond axes to the buyside’s spreadsheets, OMS or chat platform. Streaming data could be where a market-maker is constantly updating quotes from an internal pricing engine, or a broker client workflow of publishing real-time prices to clients in a ‘call around market’. And on-demand means that end users can pull the most up-to-date data from any data source. Ops users may be pulling down the latest list of ISINs to match to RIC codes for example, or risk managers might need to see live P&Ls in Symphony or Slack.

All of this needs to come with the requisite enterprise security, control, and audit necessary for financial markets.

Embracing the Cloud

Historically, data sharing in capital markets has been problematic. Either it’s been done manually, through emails, file sharing, and copying/pasting data – which is then very hard to streamline, automate, and audit – or firms have had to use expensive developers to connect data together, with none of it being ‘out of the box.’

ipushpull bundles all the data and tasks that were spread across spreadsheets, email and file shares into a new structured flow into any connected application. Utilising the Cloud as an enabling technology means you can share data inter as well as intra company. You can share data to trigger workflows with external clients, customers, and teams, and do it in any application via plug and play. And using the Cloud means it’s incredibly scalable, it’s significantly cheaper than trying to build it yourself, and it has a fast time to market.

The Cloud also offers several commercial benefits for both the suppliers of data and the end-users. From the end-user perspective, only paying for what you need allows you to match and scale your operational costs more closely with your trading activity, for example.

Beneficial use cases

Where our customers already have the data and the platform, but may lack the distribution into end-user applications, they have successfully used ipushpull either for the first or the last mile of connectivity.

The first mile is where data may be unstructured or sitting in an application or system that generally does not have any external connectivity. By connecting into ipushpull, data can be securely pushed into the Cloud and then made available elsewhere.

The last mile is about getting data into the applications or tools that your clients or your teams already use, so nothing new needs to be installed. That data can be coming directly into spreadsheets, into chat, or collaborative apps such as Symphony or Slack, or straight into your internal blotters or platforms that you might be using for that last mile of distribution.

Importantly, nothing is on-premise. Everything happens via the Cloud. Rather than engage costly development teams, or rely on manual processes where someone has to copy and paste from one application to another and send it to a counterparty who is doing something similar – a process that involves lots of manual tasks, emails, spreadsheets, copy/pasting and the like – by moving to this new way of data sharing, it unlocks both technical efficiency and automation, which means your staff can spend their time on higher-value activities or things that only humans can do such as being creative, complex decision making or speaking to clients.

A growing number of firms, including panelists from our recent webinar, such as NatWest Markets and Euromoney TRADEDATA, are now utilising different flavours of the examples given above. All of them are using ipushpull to accelerate digital initiatives to widen digital distribution channels and provide better experience for their clients and workflow efficiency and automation for end-users.

Conclusion

The digitalisation of these types of use cases will become more commonplace as people question why they are still using manual processes or one-off development projects to share data. As Data-as-a-Service becomes more prominent and firms look for technical efficiency and automation, we’ll see this new way of sharing data becoming the norm.

We see it already in the digitisation and electronification of OTC markets, where manual processes make way for standardised delivery of prices and workflow, but why stop there? Live data sharing can be ubiquitous internally across the firm, and externally to clients and counterparts – all of this being accelerated by the Cloud and by integrations into financial networks like Symphony, Refinitiv, Bloomberg, Broadridge, DTCC, Markit, etc.

In the post-COVID landscape, there is no new norm anymore. There is only a future state. As working practices change, workflow needs to be more efficient, and data needs to be easy to access, secure and access-controlled.

As we move towards live data-driven workflows, people need to be able to seamlessly connect to data in any application in real-time, at the right time, at the right place, and from any location.

We’re seeing Data-as-a-Service being adopted across sales and trading, between sell-side and buy-side, and across technology vendors. All of them are providing a better and more efficient experience for their clients.

It’s time to move away from manual processes, emails, spreadsheets, and copy/paste and away from embarking on expensive development projects to connect data from one app to another. Instead, look to incorporate Data-as-a-Service into your digital transformation projects or as a new digital distribution channel.

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.

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April 16, 2020April 9, 2021

Coronavirus Forces Change for Sales and Traders Working from Home

Firms embracing the latest communication, collaboration and workflow platforms have a significant advantage

Coronavirus has caused a dramatic shift in working practices globally, with particular challenges for front office workers in capital markets. Financial institutions have moved operations in differing ways but there has been a clear progression from staff split between office and disaster recovery sites, through to the entire workforce working from home.

Initially, due to both the nature of how a sales and trading desk runs as well as regulations around recorded phone calls and record keeping, front office workers were still going into the office. However, as lockdowns tightened and following the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) temporarily waiving some of its supervisory rules the majority of sales and trading staff are now working from home with a reluctant few still having to travel in to man a skeleton staff dealing desk.

Contingency planning

Fortunately, the post credit crisis increase in financial regulation and focus on operational risk has led to improved contingency planning, and regular comprehensive testing of offsite technology, with many firms enforcing days or weeks working from home before the tightened lockdown to ensure a seamless transition.

In conjunction with improved planning there has also been a change in the way businesses operate over the last decade – expensive city locations have led to a desire to downsize available space for workers. Many firms do not provide enough desks to cover all staff and hence increased home working has become prevalent in many teams. The cost of any perceived reduction in productivity was seen to be easily offset by savings on desk space and the benefits to employees of a more flexible working environment; from easier childcare logistics to lack of a commute. Whilst these employees in capital markets were more likely to be away from the front line of trading it has been a valuable learning exercise in how to improve the home working experience.

#WFH – A new paradigm

Working at home for the most part involves remotely connecting to a work computer via VPN – this places less stress on home PCs and internet access. Although reliable broadband can still be an issue, especially when combined with multiple other users such as family members, who are all isolating in the same location. As home setups are unlikely to have the 6-8 monitors that a dealing desk has, contingency planning in the weeks before lockdown went as far as arranging work screen layouts to fit into those available at home. Unfortunately, those that were looking for additional home screens have struggled with both rocketing demand and global shortages in PC equipment making new screens, webcams and hardware hard to come by.

As governments further tightened restrictions and lockdowns, operationally these moves have appeared to have been a success – core tasks have been achievable, levels of service have remained superficially similar, but activity levels have fallen.

The challenge of remote working now moves away from the physical logistics to how to operate in this new environment. The proliferation of systems, screen real estate, applications and communication methods need to be simplified. The new working environment needs to adjust working practices towards less screens and less verbal communication while allowing for more non-work interruptions (particularly if young children are at home) as well as a new interpersonal dynamic.

Technology steps up

During the first phases of lockdown, cloud providers have seen a meteoric rise in usage with many additional datacentres being brought on-line, with even the likes of Microsoft suffering outages in Azure (its cloud platform) and Teams (its chat platform) due to surging demand in mid-March.

Meanwhile chat platforms are seeing record numbers of usage with Symphony seeing 40% increase in daily users in Q1 and Microsoft Teams usage has more than doubled to 44 million users, while video conferencing applications like Zoom are now a household name.

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.

Recreating a sales and trading desk to work from home

One of the biggest complaints so far from sales and trading has been around screen real estate. This is a problem at the best of times (with 4-8 screens in the office) but now this issue is significantly amplified due to home set ups only having 1-3 screens. However that hasn’t stopped some traders sharing their home trading setups, which now even has its own hashtag on Instagram – #ronarigs.

The prolific rise in chat usage has gone some way to replace the rapid fire communication on a dealing desk – a combination of shouting, absorbing chatter through osmosis and hoot-n-holler speaker systems – which have all but disappeared. These dealing room conversations, and camaraderie among peers, form a valuable part of market colour, which now needs to be recreated digitally.

Sales and traders from both buy-side and sell-side have said that there has been a significant increase in chat and calls, making it harder to stay on top of everything. The increase in communication results in a slower speed of trade. What is needed is a better, smarter and faster way to aggregate and consolidate communication, data, notifications and workflow, with less back and forth communication.

Therefore, there is ample demand for digital initiatives, such as:

Simplified workflows with manual interventions becoming the exception rather than the norm – emailed trades sent within spreadsheets or prices copied and pasted into a chat that are then entered into pricing systems should be replaced with data driven flows outside of email or fully integrated into chat
User defined notifications become ever more important, as not all apps may be visible on a desktop particularly with limited screen space
Axe collation and distribution, commonplace on many sales and trading desks, should integrate tools to monitor performance and client interest
Price or economic data aggregation, to condense 10+ sources into one front end, reducing screen space and enabling more effective filtering and watchlists
Key risk and performance metrics should be timely, easy to collate across disparate systems and subsequently made available in the best possible way to users
Elimination of sequential file sharing and increasing the ability to work on the same documents in parallel
On screen charts that colleagues used to walk over to view, now need to be accessible, more self-explanatory and intuitive

With a thriving capital markets fintech ecosystem, vendors like ipushpull, Symphony, ChartIQ, Adaptable Tools, Openfin and Greenkey not only interoperate between each other but also provide the tools to streamline workflow more efficiently for sales and traders working at home.

One UK investment bank that has embraced the fintech ecosystem has seen a significant increase in price requests from digital channels, further reinforcing investment to ramp up more digital initiatives. Technology is very much providing an edge in this current climate.

During this time ipushpull has seen significant increase in adoption. The platform makes it simple to connect, share and automate workflow between data, applications and people in real-time. Ease of collaboration, the clarity of information and how it is displayed all become critical. As face-to-face contact has diminished live data, sharing across differing groups of teams and systems becomes paramount to future remote working success, all whilst retaining the monitoring and audit controls necessary for regulated institutions.

Because many business user tools were not built for dynamic and unstructured work and front office dealing desks were not built for home working, there is a huge opportunity for lasting and improved workflow efficiency through the use of technology like ipushpull and other leading collaboration and workflow platforms.

January 10, 2018January 10, 2018

Former Bloomberg Global Product Manager Joins FinTech Startup ipushpull Advisory Board

London, UK – 10th January 2018: ipushpull is pleased to announce that Amar Rajani has joined its Advisory Board with immediate effect.

Amar is Founder and Managing Director of Argella Limited, an advisory firm specialising in FinTech with specialist knowledge in research, data and collaboration. Prior to launching Argella, Amar spent 17 years at Bloomberg LP, where he was Global Product Manager for Bloomberg’s research management business with responsibility for the launch and growth of Bloomberg’s custom data product as well as its integration to authoring solutions and other core applications. During this period, he was also a founding member of Bloomberg’s Enterprise Products and Data Solutions team.

Amar is advising on sales and product strategy around secure, audited, MiFID 2 compliant research model hosting. Using ipushpull, research analysts at financial institutions can provide live access to research models, often in spreadsheets, to clients without sharing files.

Matthew Cheung, CEO of ipushpull, comments:

“Amar’s experience and knowledge of enterprise data, authoring and collaboration allows ipushpull to target our solutions to a wide range of consumers across both buy and sell-side. His understanding of the regulatory impact on both producers and consumers of research content allows ipushpull to tailor our services to adapt with the growing challenges and commercial pressures faced by our clients”.

Amar Rajani, Founder & Managing Director of Argella, comments:

“I have been impressed with ipushpull from the moment I saw a demo of the product. ipushpull have built a unique range of solutions that can help any firm that needs to share data or content in a fully managed and controlled manner. The level of integration into applications like Excel, Symphony, Slack, databases, websites and third party systems takes data interoperability to the next level”.

About ipushpull

ipushpull provides secure real-time data sharing and collaboration for financial institutions between desktop applications such as Excel, cloud services such as Symphony, databases and internal proprietary systems on a fully access-controlled and audited platform. Learn more at https://www.ipushpull.com/.

About Argella

Amar Rajani is Founder and Managing Director of Argella Limited, where he serves as an advisor to FinTech companies, consults on research and data solutions. Learn more at http://www.argella.co.uk/.

Contacts

ipushpull

Matthew Cheung

CEO

+44(0)20 3808 4805

info@ipushpull.com

Argella

Amar Rajani

Founder & Managing Director

+44(0)20 3292 0605

info@argella.co.uk

December 7, 2017December 12, 2017

Out with the old, in with the new….AIM gets the chop while Symphony picks up the slack

The recent explosive growth of collaboration platforms like Symphony, Slack and Microsoft Teams can be at least in part attributed to the withdrawal of existing older chat platforms from the market. Or in some cases, their support for 3^rd party integrations is leaving users no choice but to look for alternative solutions. As the user base of older chat bots declines, users are turning towards new collaboration platforms.

One example is the support for third party APIs within Skype. Skype originally launched in 2003 and grew rapidly, reaching 600 million users by 2010. One of the key Skype features that was used by businesses was its support for 3^rd party APIs. These enabled users to build bespoke functionality such as simple chat bots to automatically push information into Skype from other applications, such as a local database or a spreadsheet running on the same box.

Skype APIs have already disappeared

From late 2013 Skype withdrew support for third party APIs to deliver messages between Skype and other desktop applications. Initially, the impact was fairly minimal because most existing users simply did not upgrade to the new version. However, recently Microsoft has been removing the ability for customers to log in to older versions. One major ‘forced upgrade’ occurred in March 2017. Although customers do benefit from newer features, the result of the forced upgrade is that many of the historical 3^rd party API features, and therefore customer integrations, are no longer supported.

AIM gets dropped on December 15th 2017

Another example of a change to a legacy platform which is impacting (in this case) the financial community is the withdrawal of AOL’s instant messenger service AIM. Launched in 1997, AIM was one of the first online messaging services to catch on in mainstream America. At its peak, AIM had more than 18 million simultaneous users, and the ability to communicate instantly made AIM a huge hit on Wall Street. However, with the arrival of many other social media and chat services, usage of AIM has gradually diminished, and current owners Verizon have announced the withdrawal of the service on December 15^th 2017. Which means the existing 100,000 or so users need a new chat platform to move their business communication to.

And there’s more – another chat service that was widely used in the financial community is Yahoo Messenger, originally Yahoo Pager, launched in 1998. This recently discontinued its legacy platform, including support for ‘plug-ins’, resulting in loss of functionality for many in the financial community. Yahoo shelved its legacy messaging service in August 2016. At the time ICE Chat picked up much of the slack as Yahoo messenger was heavily used by commodities traders who were already trading ICE commodities instruments.

The Age of new communication platforms – replacing legacy chat bots

So what options do customers who have been using these legacy chat platforms have when key legacy features, such as third-party API support, are removed?

First of course, if the platform itself is withdrawn then the team, or often the whole community, may need to migrate to another chat platform. Historical users of AIM and Yahoo have migrated to a number of different services. Symphony, CME Pivot and ICE chat, for example, have proven popular alternatives, leaving the problem of migrating all those chat bots. In the case of Skype, while the platform itself has not been withdrawn, those all-important bespoke applications and bot integrations still need to be somehow migrated from the discontinued API.

All in all, a lot of headaches for the user base and a lot of work for developers.

However, many more forward-thinking users are taking the opportunity to explore a wave of new chat and collaboration platforms such as Slack and Symphony. When combined with a powerful live data platform like ipushpull to connect into other applications, they offer not only a richer feature set but also a much more user-focussed off-the-shelf experience for building automated features like bots – requiring far less, if any, of that premium developer time.

Using chat applications with 3rd party APIs

Using a bot to interrogate a spreadsheet to pull out specific text value and post to a chat – may have required in-house developers to build some complex VBA (Visual basic for applications) to interrogate the in-house application and a further integration to post to the chat application in a rather crude text format.

In comparison, building such a bot with ipushpull and, for example, Symphony (the fast growing collaboration platform of choice for the financial services community) is a quick task, can be done by a non-developer, providing a far richer set of options for management and presentation of data, as well as interoperability through APIs into other systems and all-important security and audit.

Henry Schwartz of Trade Alert LLC, has built a thriving business providing real-time options flow and analysis to most of Wall Street’s banks. Trade Alert provide their intelligence as a messaging service to many different chat platforms including AIM. Trade Alert have been a supporter of Symphony and have now built bots to pull in timely option market colour servicing the vacuum that the disappearance of AIM has left.

“Financial professionals are beginning to realise the potential of next-generation chat and collaboration tools like Symphony. Between proprietary in-house applications and innovative offerings from service providers like ipushpull we expect to see explosive growth in these spaces”

Henry Schwartz, Trade Alert

Working with exciting new platforms like Symphony and ipushpull means we can add a layer of additional richness and interoperability that old legacy platforms could never provide. Below is snapshot of an options traders dashboard within Symphony integrating Trade Alert content with live data from ipushpull.

Other fintech companies such as London based fincloud have also been able to capitalise on the phenomenal rise of Symphony. Bringing expertise from trading applications, and API connectivity, fincloud have created bots which improve workflow across sales and trading desks, as well as operations staff, by creating simple to use bots that can massively improve efficiency of tasks. For example a portfolio manager can look up research recommendations via a chat message or a trader could put on a trade via a bot in a chat room.

An innovative fintech collaboration between fincloud and ipushpull has produced a trading bot that can make a trade via a chat message and show real-time orders through a live blotter. Normally this workflow would require a trader to use multiple (and costly) applications to create a trade, instead this entire workflow can all be done in a chat inside of Symphony. This solution could be used as chat based OMS (order management system) for small hedge funds instead of using expensive trading applications.

“This is only the start of what can be done bringing together cutting edge financial markets technology. Chat and bots are the future and fincloud, Symphony and ipushpull are part of the revolution”

Jon Jenkins, fincloud

Furthermore, in cases like Slack where the in-app UX is somewhat limited, platforms and plugins like ipushpull‘s are able to deliver not only the off-the-shelf connection to other apps and bots, but also a much-improved set of in-app features such as formatted and streaming data, so everyone in the channel can view and collaborate on the very latest information. Out of the 1000’s of apps in the Slack app directory ipushpull is the only way to push or pull ranges of live data from Excel into Slack.

And if you’re still happily using Skype – well in that case ipushpull’s interoperability means that your bots can post to the latest version of Skype (and Microsoft Teams) too!

So if your bots and bespoke apps are about to be rendered obsolete – maybe rather than looking for a quick band-aid it might be worth looking a bit further afield – it may be a lot simpler than you think!

Co-author: John Eccleston

November 9, 2017November 9, 2017

Share spreadsheets into Slack – app takes data interoperability to the next level

In a recent blog we highlighted that if chat and collaboration platforms are looking to replace email then ipushpull is positioned to replace file attachments and file sharing.

In the past few years, driven by version control frustrations, email fatigue, security concerns and the desire for faster, more interactive communication, the sharing of information via email is increasingly being overshadowed by a growing range of collaboration tools.

This space is occupied by a combination of familiar tech heavyweights together with specialist collaboration app providers where Microsoft Teams and Workplace by Facebook compete with the likes of Slack, Symphony and Atlassian’s Stride.

The development of this new set of messaging and collaboration applications offers new channels for ipushpull‘s real-time data interoperability for end users in applications they already use. ipushpull is one of the first providers to really push to the limit the capabilities of these new collaboration tools, making it easy to share spreadsheets into Slack and Symphony along with other data.

In recent years, Slack has become one of the most popular and established applications in the chat space and has seen incredible growth with 6 million active daily users. It offers cross-team channels, private groups and 1-to-1 direct messages for messaging as well as file sharing.

However, even though Slack allows spreadsheets to be uploaded on the go, there is still no way to view them in the app itself. For sharing data from Excel spreadsheets, this can be a big drawback introducing the common problems of version control and collaboration difficulties associated with files. While users of Google Sheets still have to jump out of Slack (and thus context switch) to see their data, leaving ipushpull as the only app on the market that allows users to share spreadsheets into Slack.

How to share spreadsheets into Slack with ipushpull

Until now there has been no way to view selected ranges of data from spreadsheets within the Slack chat platform. ipushpull‘s Slack app offers just this – the ability to pull a selected range of data from a live spreadsheet directly into a Slack channel whether that’s a snapshot, live data or streaming data, in a secure encrypted form, so everyone on the channel can view and collaborate on the very latest information.

The ipushpull Slack app can support a wide range of use cases where customers have a need to share data in a secure way. Static, live or streaming data may be shared within the channel manually or via simple ipushpull Slack bots. Let’s explore a couple of use cases to explain how this functionality can be used.

Snapshot, or static, data

Snapshot data maybe shared manually or automatically when certain user-defined criteria are met. For example, a manager of a chain of retail stores may share sales data with management or staff by copying and pasting data into a chat channel, instead they can improve scalability and efficiency of their service by using a bot (also provided by ipushpull of course) to share the current state of sales or automatically alert management when a sales target is hit. All from a spreadsheet connected to Slack via ipushpull.

Live data

Live data enables someone in a team, working in a collaborative way, to make updates to data in their Excel spreadsheet, or local database, for example, and have that automatically – in real time – update in the ‘team’ Slack channel. For example, a multi-national enterprise, with a bid team working in diverse locations, can use the chat and ipushpull to collaborate on a financial model in a spreadsheet with changes reflected in real time within the Slack channel. The ‘no files’ model combined with the use of live data ensures the model is maintained in a single version and is always up to date.

Share data in Slack

Streaming data

Streaming data allows a real-time ‘ticking’ feed of data to be viewed in Slack. For example, whether monitoring the US stock market or live sporting results from one of ipushpull‘s streaming ‘public’ pages, or providing access to ‘in-house’ private streaming data in manufacturing or health sectors, ipushpull delivers the ability to share true real-time updates in fast changing environments where access to up-to-the-second information makes all the difference.

These use cases demonstrate just some of the ways ipushpull’s chat integrations can be used to enhance and improve workflow and communication within organisations. And with the recent launch of shared channels within Slack, which support intra-company collaboration, there will be many more to come.

So chat is great – but it takes more than just chat to make real improvements in business efficiency. That’s why ipushpull is focussed on taking chat to the next level.

Co-author: John Eccleston

March 16, 2017March 16, 2017

No More Slacking….Microsoft Teams Launches To Office 365 Users

Microsoft Teams is no longer in soft launch or ‘customer preview’ as the $500 billion company likes to call it. As of now, Teams is included in the Enterprise and Small Business versions of Office 365. During its soft launch the collaboration platform managed to attract more than 50,000 companies (including Accenture, ConocoPhillips, Deloitte, Expedia and Sage to name a few) and have added over 100 new features and integrations which include bots, ability to email channels and audio calling from mobile devices. Also including a host of other features pointing to the technology trend of convergence.

Why the mad rush to get Teams out to market? Well the answer is Slack, the white hot collaboration platform that is the fastest growing business application ever. With 5 million users Slack isn’t afraid of the the 40 year old incumbent demonstrated by its brazen NY Times advert back in November.

Sun Tzu – The Supreme Art Of War Is To Subdue Slack And Launch Teams Without Fighting

However, it looks like Microsoft’s strategy is not to directly target Slack users but to pick up Office 365 users (all 85 million of them) who do not use Slack or any other similar applications – something we picked up on in our previous blog on Microsoft Teams back in November.

Since then the workspace collaboration platform market continues to heat up with Google recently reigniting ‘Hangouts‘, bringing in integrations with Google Apps such as Sheets and Docs as well as natural language parsing bots (something Microsoft is also doing) and Workplace by Facebook (previously called Facebook at Work) is quietly gaining users. Gartner research predicts that globally businesses will spend $5.1 billion in 2017 on collaboration, conferencing and social tools.

There is also Symphony which rarely gets a mention in the same space as Slack because of its major focus on financial market participants. Might be one to watch as back in 2015 Google was part of a $100 million investment round into Symphony. Perhaps Google’s plan is to integrate Google Apps like Sheets and Docs into Symphony in order to break into financial institutions who are all huge enterprise users of Microsoft Office?

On Your Marks……And They’re Off!

2017 will be an interesting year – which company can innovate faster and gain more traction?

Slack was first off and has even upped a gear to appeal to enterprise users by offering the ‘Grid’ (perhaps they are concerned about the competition). Teams is free to its own Office 365 user base, which if Microsoft can crack gives the perfect entry point into the 1.2 billion desktop users Microsoft is pushing to the cloud (an area where revenues have doubled over the last quarter).

With ipushpull ‘s vision of live data interoperability between all apps, whether desktop or web, our integrations with Slack, Symphony and Microsoft Teams mean whichever way the wind blows we can play an increasing role in this fast growing collaborative market.

Watch this space…..

November 3, 2016January 6, 2017

First Look at Microsoft Teams

Earlier this year Microsoft executives were internally pushing for a bid for Slack at about $8 billion (at the time Slack was valued at $3.8 billion). However this was vetoed by none other than Mr Gates and CEO Satya Nadella. They both believed that it was better to build than to buy, and chose to beef up Skype instead. So Microsoft Teams was developed as a “chat-based workspace that’s focused on real-time collaboration”. The first look at Microsoft Teams generated an interesting reaction from their biggest rival, Slack.

Yesterday, on the morning of Microsoft’s launch of Teams, Stewart Butterfield the CEO of Slack took out a defiant and defensive full one page advert in the New York Times (see below).

….but Slack has good reason to be concerned.

Here is what our first look at Microsoft Teams showed

The overwhelming first impression is the excellent integration with online Office365 (Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Outlook etc..). It is very impressive. This will immediately be of interest to enterprise users familiar with the Office ecosystem who hadn’t even considered Slack before. Microsoft 1, Slack 0.

Slack is the fastest growing start up in history because people are fed up with email, especially for collaborative work. In addition, Slack has had extremely strong user growth because the real-time chat effectively becomes a ‘one stop shop’. Slack users can pull information from any integrated 3rd party service, directly into a chat channel without having to open another program. For example, you can pull in Salesforce data while you are having a chat with your sales team or the developer team can have automatic server messages within a chat. This concept of pulling information into Slack from different sources has also helped the recent rise of “Bots”.

However, Microsoft yesterday demonstrated similar capabilities by pulling Twitter messages into Teams, and is looking to build a similar suite of offerings and integrations much like Slack has. iPushPull will be one of them.

We found the UI to be cleaner then Slack, even if it is noticeably slow. Perhaps, because everyone around the world is testing it out for themselves.

Live data in Microsoft Teams

The tabs feature is very cool. For example, you can add an Excel tab to a channel which displays any Excel files that are on Onedrive. You can make changes in desktop or online Excel which, after a refresh, will be viewable on the Teams tab. Great for collaborative working. However, you cannot display live data in Excel on Teams. This is where iPushPull comes into play.

While we work on a full integration for Teams, in the meantime we can integrate a full iPushPull page within Teams using the HTML tab function. Et voila you can get live real-time data on Teams direct from desktop Excel.

Who will win the race from here?

Perhaps Microsoft Teams makes Skype for Business and Yammer redundant. My guess is that ultimately Microsoft want to get everyone using an Office365 account (I couldn’t log-on with an ancient Hotmail account for example) which is why you can’t import your personal Skype contacts (quite annoying). There is a also a much greater scope for richer integrations into Microsoft Teams, compared to Slack’s mainly text-based interface.

It feels like Teams is a superior offering for enterprise users. Slack may well be the contender for the anti-Microsoft crown aimed at non-enterprises, start ups, small business and millennials who did not grow up with Microsoft and use Google Apps for Work instead. Office 365 does have 85 million users versus Slack’s 4 million and this is a great offering from Microsoft to stop ‘pesky upstarts’ biting at their heels. Looks like they have learnt from their mistakes with Yammer.

To see how easy it is to get live data into Excel, Slack and Microsoft Teams, sign up for a free trial of iPushPull today.

October 19, 2016

Real-time Risk Aggregation using iPushPull

Proprietary Traders, Brokers, Clearing Services and their clients all need to know the market exposure and risk to their firms at any given point in time. Risk managers often sit in front of multiple screens monitoring positions in real-time from multiple risk modules on different trading platforms. Without expensive development work or costly enterprise risk systems, there is no way to automatically aggregate market risk, trading positions and P&L’s in real-time from multiple trading and risk platforms in multiple locations.

Principles of Risk Aggregation – BCBS239

In addition to trading risk, since the financial crisis, regulators have introduced new broader rules such as BCBS239, ‘Principles for Effective Risk Data Aggregation and Risk Reporting’, aiming to strengthen risk management at banks and reduce the chances of future instabilities in the global financial system. However, many key challenges such as budgetary pressures, old legacy systems and complexity in consolidating risk from different locations means many banks and other financial organisations are unable to automate necessary risk frameworks. This often leads them to resort to manual workarounds which are slow, cumbersome and can lead to human error.

Consolidate your real-time risk

iPushPull offers a plug-and-play solution which can be set up with no integration or development work. Our service enables the automatic consolidation of risk periodically, or in real-time, from multiple locations and multiple sources.
Risk can be aggregated at any level, from high-level summaries for executive management to detailed reports for risk managers who need to drill down to traders’ individual positions. iPushPull’s technology integrates with popular desktop applications, like Microsoft Excel. It also makes it easy to set up customised alerts, view risk on mobile devices and permission and share risk dashboards with other departments or clients. The platform offers end-to-end encryption and a full audit trail with history of every single price update and who looked at it, when and where from.

Automate and consolidate your risk management controls with no development work using iPushPull and share securely with other departments and clients. Sign up for a free trial today, or contact us for further information.