Blog – Page 2 – ipushpull

April 23, 2020July 9, 2020

How Covid-19 and Remote Working will Create Permanent Disruption of the Post Trade Process within Capital Markets

James Maxfield, Managing Director, Ascendant Strategy

Digitalisation has been a hot topic for several years within the post trade environment, with industry commentators forecasting a revolution on par with the transformation of sales and trading, that years of electronification brought to the front office. But despite all of the posturing and big intentions, little has materially changed outside of pockets of innovation led by start-ups such as Access Fintech trying to drive industry collaboration. Email continues to be the dominant communication tool of choice, with spreadsheets and PDF’s being leveraged on the whole to provide the content to feed exception management processes. And in some cases, faxes still persist for the exchange of confirmations or signed documents that require validation against physical signatory lists.

That is not to say that there isn’t demand for innovation – there is significant pent up frustration at the C-level around the number of people typically involved in the process – but the lack of significant progress is more a reflection of prioritisation and allocation of resources to drive these agendas. With time and resources an increasingly scarce commodity for all but the largest global players, focus for most has been trying to keep on top of the day job. The fragmented operating models that persist for most after a decade of near and far shoring, creates an increasing disconnect between senior leadership and those doing the job on the ground. All of which makes the digitalisation agenda a thing to envy for most post trade leaders.

So, given the complexity of this problem, how will the current situation provide a catalyst for change that a decade of industry cost pressure has been unable to create?

Here are some reasons why.

Leaders are being forced to lead digitally. The pandemic crisis has fast tracked a generation of leaders into the digital age, in a way that no-one could have predicted. And being intelligent people, they are seeing the benefits this can bring. Ascendant Strategy spoke with the client service head in the markets division of a bank who was delighted with how Zoom was able to connect him with his teams. This was no sleight on his digital savviness, but more a reflection around banks still relying on old world tool sets to manage their day to day workload. They have now seen what is possible in terms of communication mechanisms such as Symphony, Slack and Microsoft Teams. And they like it.
Operational Resilience. This has been a focus area for some time by the UK regulator and will continue to be a global focus in the future. And whilst some will justifiably claim that the scale and impact of the pandemic could not be predicted, all regulators will expect resilience models to be updated to reflect the impact of it.

‘Delivering operational resilience requires firms to take decisive and effective actions, for example by replacing outdated or weak infrastructure, increasing systems’ capacity or addressing key person dependencies.’ FCA

These expectations will force organisations to look hard at capacity constraints and key person or location dependencies (individuals and groups) that have arisen and rethink some of their historic investment decisions. And whilst some commentary reads that this will push a ‘jobs return home’ agenda, we see this as uninformed opinion on the whole. Near and far shore centres provide well educated talent pools, capacity and skills that do not exist in the local job market – so Ascendant Strategy does not see a material shift in the global make up of resourcing. Besides, multi-location sites provide valuable BCP benefit (albeit of little value in a global lockdown). But where the investment decision was based solely on ‘cost of automation’ vs ‘cost of manual processing’ expect to see greater emphasis now being placed on how automation can deliver improved resilience.

‘Old School’ management no longer works. Traditional approaches to crisis management and severe market volatility typically relied on ‘old-school’ management styles. Key people (typically process experts) huddled together in a war room, from 7am till late with whiteboards and spreadsheets. With leadership getting into the detail and providing command and control through experience gained in prior battles. Tea and medals were won during these periods, with battlefield promotions not being uncommon. However, this is already showing itself as being unsustainable during this extended lock down period – anecdotally, fails and collateral management are key pain points within the industry right now – highlighting the lack of standardised processes and pinch-points within many post trade processes that cause them to lack scale in stressed situations. And these areas will have cost firm’s real money in terms of operational losses, given the ongoing levels of volatility (VIX has been over 80 in March 2020, having reached 30 once in the prior 5 years). People will adapt, but the reality is that this will force a change in leadership style (and leaders in some cases), pushing demands for process standardisation and greater levels of automation. All of which will unlock opportunities for digital solution providers.
The demise of the shared inbox. As the post trade process adapts quickly to the capabilities digital communication channels provide, other tool sets will quickly follow. Where FinTech’s have existing integrations with these channels, they will find opportunities to use them as a beachhead to accelerate opportunities to deliver automation and efficiency into the post trade space. The change is already happening with, for example, firms like ipushpull offering real-time workflow apps and notifications and as a service across multiple channels including chat applications. This is driving fast change with low hanging fruit such as the shared inbox being rapidly demoted as the preferred workflow tool.

The world is faced with a crisis that no-one would have predicted 6 months ago – and focus quite rightly is now tuned to survival. But once this passes and some sort of normality returns, reflection will start. And it is this process of reflection that will provide opportunities for FinTech’s to help capital markets firms accelerate their post trade digital agendas.

About Ascendant Strategy

Ascendant Strategy is a specialist post trade consultancy operating within capital markets. We bring technology and operations together, bringing experienced, practitioner expertise to deliver transformational outcomes for organisations where complexity has overpowered efficiency.

Find out more here at www.ascendant-strategy.com or follow us on Linkedin or twitter @Ascendant_Strat.

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.

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.

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.

April 7, 2020April 8, 2020

Data Connectivity Essential For Remote Work

Extracted from the article “Data Connectivity essential for remote work” by Shanny Basar.

Matthew Cheung, CEO of ipushpull, said there had been an increase in interest in the company’s ability to provide live data sharing as more staff are working remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Cheung told Markets Media: “The cloud has a couple of silver linings. As more people are working remotely, firms want the ability to share data in real-time while maintaining their institutional controls over access.”

London-based ipushpull allows users to securely share data in real-time across desktop applications, databases, messaging platforms and cloud services.

Cloud technology

The Data-as-a-Service platform was launched three years ago and allows data to be easily shared using cloud technology.

“Cloud deployment was a big challenge in capital markets,”Cheung added. “An enormous tanker started slowly turning three years ago at a slow pace and has picked up speed in the last 12 months.”

He predicted there will be an acceleration in deployment of the cloud in the next nine to 12 months, especially as the Covid-19 pandemic has caused staff to work from remote locations while still needing access to real-time data.

In capital markets ipushpull has initially focussed on non-exchange traded assets that require manual processes. For example, when dealers make prices for options in Excel spreadsheets and then have to copy and paste the information into emails for distribution. ipushpull has been used by an interdealer-broker to automate this process by uploading the excel data into the cloud so it can be shared live it in various formats such via chat or an API.

“We make the data interoperable enabling live collaboration,”added Cheung.

Data-as-a-Service

Financial institutions such as NatWest Markets and data vendors such as Euromoney Tradedata use ipushpull to deliver data direct to their clients.

To learn more about Data-as-a-Service and how institutions are utilising the ipushpull platform read the full Markets Media article by Shanny Basar.

…

January 16, 2020April 19, 2021

Full list of 2020 London FinTech events, meetups & conferences

The UK FinTech sector continues to go from strength to strength, despite the Brexit-related challenges the economy has faced recently. Last year beat the record for UK fintech investment. London alone saw a record year with over $2bn of funding, surpassing even New York. With the continuing presence of large global financial services firms and easy access to capital, London is the place to be for startups. ipushpull, a UK-based FinTech company providing live data sharing and workflow automation, is one of many London-based companies benefiting from the wide array of opportunities on its doorstep.

With this continued buzz it’s no surprise that London will be full of interesting and exciting fintech events and conferences in 2020. We’ve compiled a list of all 2020 London fintech events and conferences happening across the city. Stay on top of these opportunities to move your business ahead of the competition in 2020.

You can share this list of events or embed it in your own blog by clicking the Share button on the toolbar below the list. You can also save it to Excel by clicking Download from the bottom toolbar.

2020 London FinTech Events and Conferences to attend

Be sure to sign up to ipushpull today to embed data into your web pages just like the table above.

If you would like to add an event to the list above, please contact info@ipushpull.com.

December 10, 2019December 16, 2019

ipushpull sees cloud adoption streamline financial markets workflows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 29, 2019November 4, 2019

How to Excel in your Post-Trade Digitalisation Workflow

A senior manager at a major bank noted at a recent conference that some staff spent well over 60% of their time in email, chat and spreadsheets. As we complete the journey from paper to digital, with increased compliance and regulatory burden in our industry, is there an opportunity to innovate here?

A lot of post-trade workflow is spent managing exceptions and reconciliation breaks, which means viewing data from different systems in a normalised way. Spreadsheets lend themselves to this challenge and have become the norm, since they do not care what the source is. So long as the data is tabular and there is a common key across systems you can just copy the data across or re-enter it.

Alastair Rutherford, MD Ascendant Strategy says:

“Getting on top of all the data exchanges and workflows that occur to support post-trade activities is a key element of any Digital strategy in Capital Markets organisations. To industrialise post-trade, and make a step-function reduction in TCO, firms must understand these processes properly in the context of their target operating model, and implement automation that complements their core applications.”

There is a rich ecosystem of tools and applications to provide the glue such as external data lookup or calculation tools. Once you have added that glue it becomes transportable to your peers. Those with whom you share these spreadsheets can see exactly what you see and the method behind your conclusions.

Well, not quite… if you want to modify the recipe in your calculations, a new spreadsheet needs to be sent. When speaking to your peers (especially outside the organisation) how do you know you are looking at the same spreadsheet? What happens if the data that drives the calculation is changing or perhaps only available for you? What happens if you have incorrectly entered some of that data. Before long you have a huge pile of legacy, complicated spreadsheets, hopefully accurate for the moment they were created but with a context and scenario unclear in the document and certainly unclear to anyone auditing it. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Accenture has estimated £125bn of complexity costs in pre-trade and post-trade workflows.

The solution here is to use a common set of tools in an environment which is centralised and maintained. Platforms such as Symphony can deliver the environment securely, meeting the needs of Information Security. However, the tools need to allow users common access to shared data with the appropriate interface to meet the needs within the post-trade workflow.

At ipushpull we are seeing a great deal of interest in our collaborative data platform to deliver exactly this – the ability to share data in real-time between groups of users, for workflow tools to rapidly enable decisions to be made which are then fully audited, but also the ability to rapidly adapt.

The success of the spreadsheet has been its ability to provide a quick solution to a business problem which is generally planned to be temporary. Over time, however, the overhead of navigating and maintaining the collection of spreadsheets has become too high. ipushpull addresses this challenge by providing an ecosystem for collaborative workflow across the post-trade community, delivering efficiency savings in terms of time spent converting data, but also cost savings in terms of accuracy – reducing the data errors means less resolutions. Less resolutions means more efficiency savings.

If you would like to speak to ipushpull please get in touch with sales@ipushpull.com.

October 3, 2019November 4, 2019

The ipushpull Bot Framework: No-code rapid delivery of data bots

ipushpull is excited to extend its data sharing platform to include a new innovative bots-by-configuration framework that means powerful data chat bots can be built and deployed in hours.

Normally building bots takes time: integrating with chat, developing the logic and importantly connecting to the right data services or applications. This means costs are high and time-to-market is often weeks or months.

The new ipushpull offering rapidly accelerates delivery combining our existing plug-and-play unified live data platform with a bots-by-configuration approach.

This means your chat bot can easily be configured with no-code to connect to data from multiple sources (MS Excel, in-house DBs, cloud services) and to run in multiple chat environments including (Symphony, Microsoft Teams, Slack).

The ipushpull platform provides a no-code paradigm shift in how powerful workflow data bots can be rapidly built, deployed and managed with a consistent and unified approach.

Its as easy as:

Plug in your live data to ipushpull
Configure your bot tasks
Deploy your bot and get going!

In capital markets the ipushpull bot model is already being applied to many live or on-demand workflows including:

Product due diligence permission for trading desks
Live axe trades for buyside
Reference data from 3^rd party data-as-a-service

An example of a data bot in Symphony chat

ipushpull is a live data sharing platform that is revitalizing financial services with innovative workflow automation solutions for clients such as NatWest Markets.

To learn more please contact sales@ipushpull.com.

September 18, 2019September 25, 2019

Innovations in Investment Operations Technology – ipushpull part of InvestOps Europe 2019

ipushpull CEO Matthew Cheung will be representing the best of London’s thriving fintech scene this week when he participates in the “Dragon’s Den”-style innovation session at InvestOps Europe, the leading buy-side event.

As part of the ‘New Game-Changers’ afternoon on 19^th September, Matthew will be pitching ipushpull, the unique service that connects and automates workflow between data, applications and people – in real-time – across the capital markets ecosystem. His pitch is part of a wider discussion of ‘the latest and greatest innovations in Investment Operations technology, which offer true added value and should be considered for future investment plans’.

With 350 business leaders in attendance significant discussion is expected around how technology, and the resulting improvements in efficiency, is vital for firms to stay ahead of competitors in a cost- pressured middle and back office environment.

Across the sector, buy side firms are facing similar technology challenges as they plan priorities and budgets for the coming year, namely:

Automation of manual processes
Moving away from spreadsheet reliance and manual intervention
Accurate, centralised, standardised data
Seamless integration into 3^rd party services, legacy platforms and cloud services
Easy cross-asset class expansion

According to Ascendant Strategy, a capital markets consultancy specialising in post-trade transformation, many of these challenges arise from the outsourcing of buy side operations to custodians, prime brokers, fund admins and other back office service providers. This outsourcing often leads to inefficiencies, with day-to-day processes such as reconciliation and fails management dependent on manual interventions by operations analysts using email, file sharing and chat.

Increased regulation is another driver for technology investment.

Phases 4 and 5 of UMR (Uncleared Margin Rules) for OTC derivatives, coming into force in September 2019 and 2020 respectively, could result in thousands of firms could facing hefty fines for non-compliance. An InvestOps survey of 100 buy side firms showed that 28% of them are not prepared and only 16% are fully compliant. A key part of these regulations relates to the exchange of collateral information, often held on disparate systems and spreadsheets and shared using email. Improvements to workflow efficiency are consequently crucial for successful implementation of the rules.

CSDR (Central Securities Depositories Regulation) adds further pressure as it’s expected to result in an increase in pre-settlement mistakes due to tighter matching criteria. This means firms face potentially significant fines falling due when failed trades remain unmatched after 4-7 days. Domain Matters, a boutique advisory firm specialising in operations and technology for financial markets, expect increased demand from Operations teams looking for tools to enable them to quickly collaborate and resolve unmatched pre-settlement items and minimise these penalties.

Finally, SMR (Senior Manager Regime) for buyside, means oversight is increasingly important for any information exchange with outsourced service providers, counterparties or in-house trading desks. The ability to demonstrate governance is critical – a challenge if data workflows are not audited, compliant, centralised and easy to retrieve.

However, there is hope and opportunity. Accenture estimates up to £125bln of complexity costs in pre- and post-trade can be reduced significantly or eliminated through improvements in efficiency.

Live data sharing and workflow automation platforms such as ipushpull are helping to solve these complex challenges. The London-based fintech firm enables customers to streamline their processes by connecting and synchronising data in real-time across multiple applications and building data-driven workflow tools with little or no code.

The ipushpull platform is not limited to any single workflow or asset class but can be applied to a wide range of tasks, with custom apps created in hours and days rather than months and years. This enabling technology is helping middle and back office to create workflow apps and micro-ecosystems – both internally with the front office and externally with counterparties – and streamline common and time-critical workflows including collateral management and high-risk break resolution plus common tasks such as client onboarding.

ipushpull has been recognised by financial industry publications such as the The Wall Street Journal, Waters Technology and The Trade News, has also won 3 industry awards and has been named in the 100 most influential Fintech companies of 2019 by The Financial Technologist, now holding the title for two years in a row. Get in touch if you want to find out more at sales@ipushpull.com.

September 10, 2019September 10, 2019

The Regtech Book – End User Computing risk in a regulated world

We’ve been waiting for this event for a while and finally, ipushpull CTO David Jones is a published author! He’s contributed a chapter to the newly published The RegTech Book, a comprehensive review of the fast-growing RegTech ecosystem and its potential to transform the financial services industry.

The RegTech Book covers a broad range of topics. It investigates how new technologies, including AI and blockchain, can be applied to compliance. It looks at the economic impact of digitization and datafication of regulation. And it studies how regulators themselves can help drive the process through collaborations with RegTech pioneers and innovations such as regulatory sandboxes. Other contributors bringing their industry expertise to the book alongside David include compliance professionals, regulators, business leaders and entrepreneurs.

It’s 2019 and people are still using spreadsheets

David’s chapter, Old Tech + New Tech = RegTech: Excel Spreadsheets and End User Computing in a Regulated World, describes how legacy IT and ingrained working cultures in organisations lead to business and regulatory risks. It focuses specifically on the problems of managing and de-risking the vast numbers of End User Computing (EUC) solutions, usually spreadsheets, that institutions still rely on today to keep their businesses running.

A number of widely-reported failures exacerbated by EUCs, including the ‘London Whale’ trading debacle that cost JP Morgan $6bn in 2012, prompted regulators to oblige banks to monitor and control their use. The Dodd-Frank, Basel II and Sarbanes-Oxley Acts insist that banks keep a comprehensive inventory of pricing and risk models, including EUCs, and implement internal control structures around their use.

David’s chapter discusses the actions banks must take to comply with these regulations and the RegTech tools they can use to discover the extent of their EUC dependency, maintain their EUC inventories and, ultimately, reduce the number of manual spreadsheet-driven workflows.

Breaking away

At ipushpull we help our customers to solve the last stage of this challenge. Our platform enables them to automate manual workflows from front to back office, internally and between counterparties. This reduces spreadsheet dependency, improves efficiency and layers control, audit and monitoring over previously unmanaged processes.

Our partners at Hub85 solve the first two stages. Their innovative spreadsheet governance solution automates the discovery and management of a company’s EUC dependency, uncovers risks within sheets and maps data lineage between them. Their Business Intelligence module is particularly powerful, providing graphical insights into EUC usage from the overall organisation level down to the individual spreadsheet.

By providing insight into the real-world challenges facing financial institutions and the regulators’ response to them, plus suggesting an actionable roadmap to ultimately solving these problems, David’s chapter is representative of the wide range of articles published in The Regtech Book. It’s essential reading for compliance professionals, regulators and policy makers, and it’s available now in store and on Amazon.

To find out more about how ipushpull can reduce your reliance on spreadsheets for business-critical processes, please get in touch with sales@ipushpull.com.

March 12, 2019March 22, 2019

ipushpull to be part of the Lord Mayor’s FinTech delegation to China

A select number of UK based FinTechs have been selected for a UK FinTech trade delegation in March 2019, travelling to China with the City of London Lord Mayor. As part of the FinTech delegation, ipushpull will represent the cutting edge of the London start-up scene while presenting and speaking at forums in Shenzhen and Shanghai to technology firms, banks, funds, VC’s and Chinese government officials. This trip is part of a larger effort that is aimed at creating a “FinTech Bridge” between the UK and China, with the objective of developing dialogue and boosting market access for companies in both countries.

The UK currently is one of the world’s leading FinTech innovation hubs that attracts the most investment in Europe. As China looks to overtake the US technology sector, already accounting for 47% of all global VC funding in 2018, the UK becomes another desirable technology partner to expand its global reach and opening new avenues for collaboration.

The City of London Lord Mayor’s FinTech delegation trip will span Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing – three megacities which have taken the lead in technology and innovation within China:

Shenzhen, known as the ‘new Silicon Valley’, borders Hong Kong and is home to 12 million people and one of the largest technology companies in the world, Tencent, worth $420bn, creator of WeChat – China’s ‘super app‘ – and bigger in the investment scene than Google and Facebook. Other major global tech players based in the Pearl River Delta City include Huawei, telecoms and mobile phone manufacturer, which in 2018 sold nearly as many phones as Apple, hardware maker Xiaomi which established itself in low cost mobile phones and is now a global leader in IOT home devices and perception AI and DJI, the worlds largest drone maker, estimated to own 50% of the North American drone market.

Shanghai, is China’s largest city with 26 million inhabitants housing the Lujiazui Financial City, or ‘Wall Street of China’ – the largest financial zone in China. The city’s financial power is only set to grow after President Xi Jinping announced in November 2018 that Shanghai will open a new technology stock exchange to rival the NASDAQ. This forms part of China’s plan to improve capital markets and to stem the flow of Chinese companies listing in the US.

Beijing, the 3000 year old city, is the capital of China, home to the four largest banks in the world by total assets (ICBC, China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank and Bank of China) and at the global forefront of AI, aiming to be the world leader in AI by 2025. Beijing is building a $2 billion AI research park near tech companies and elite Chinese universities to help achieve this goal. The city also has a thriving start-up scene spearheaded by Bytedance, the world’s most valuable private technology company, valued at $75 billion at the last funding round.

UK technology start-ups, HSBC, KPMG and VC firm Anthemis will be travelling with the delegation and participating in events and meetings with China’s finance and technology thought leaders. As part of the Shenzhen Municipal Financial Services Bureau and City of London Fintech Forum, ipushpull will be presenting to a wide range of leading Chinese firms such as Tencent, China Merchants Bank, CITIC Securities, Ping An and the PBOC. ipushpull CEO Matthew Cheung will also be participating in a panel discussion in Shanghai in front of representatives from the major Chinese exchanges, clearing houses and securities firms speaking alongside Citibank and Ant Financial on the future of FinTech innovation.

In 2018 China raised an aggregate of $111.63 billion overtaking the US and Silicon Valley in venture capital. As China divests away from the US, plagued by trade wars and Committee on Foreign Investment reviews, China seeks a stronger dialog with the UK’s leading Fintech firms, helping ambitious companies that want to set up operations in China and providing opportunities for large Chinese Fintechs and investors to enter the UK market. A large investment from China has already been seen from Chinese FinTech payment firm Ant Financial (spun out of Alibaba’s Ali Pay) – now worth $150 billion – which recently bought UK payments firm World First for $700 million.

We will be publishing more on our blog and social media as the trip progresses. Follow us on Twitter and Linkedin to keep up with the Fintech delegation in China.