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

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

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

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

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

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

Automating sales and traders’ workflows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author: Neil Weatherall

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

December 3, 2020

Digitisation of Pre-Trade Client Workflows

Streamlining workflow for sales and trading desks

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

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

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

Spreadsheets on the trading floor

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

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

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

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

Towards a standardised approach

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

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

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

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

Impact of COVID-19

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

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

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

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

Future State of pre-trade workflow

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

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

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

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

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

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

GET YOUR COPY

November 16, 2020November 26, 2020

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.

REGISTER HERE

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.

REGISTER HERE

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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September 29, 2016January 6, 2017

Research Delivery with iPushPull: A closer look at FuturesTechs

FuturesTechs is an independent research firm that provides technical analysis research to hundreds of paying subscribers. The FCA regulated firm is run by its founder, Clive Lambert, who takes a unique approach to market analysis that has earned the company the Technical Analyst Award multiple years in a row. When faced with the current problems surrounding research delivery, FuturesTechs began using iPushPull.

“[iPushPull] has put us in a position to scale up our business, getting on with what we do best, producing technical analysis rather than concerning ourselves with [delivery]”

– Clive Lambert, FuturesTech founder

Current problems with research delivery methods

For most firms, their research delivery is done via email attachments to subscribers and clients. However, this process forces research firms to relinquish control over their content. PDF attachments lack control and can be forwarded to anyone, printed, downloaded, copied and pasted elsewhere, etc., all without the permission of the research firm. All these detours to the proper research delivery channels are not monitored and therefore readers are not charged for viewing the content. This not only damages potential revenues, but the research firm actively loses money.

Research Delivery via iPushPull

FuturesTechs uses iPushPull to securely distribute their research while maintaining control over what their subscribers can do with the reports. By uploading their research to the iPushPull platform, FuturesTechs is able to share a live page with the latest version of their content to their paying subscribers. There are customisable content control levels that can be specified per subscriber that disable or enable specific features.

By using the reader report feature in the iPushPull platform, research distributors can generate reports including information on their subscriber’s reading patterns. This includes time spent per page, how frequently they read the report, and see a history of reports they’ve read before. This intensive, next-level of research delivery analytics allows FuturesTechs to optimise the content of their reports and ensure that their subscribers are getting the most value from the information they receive. The back-end administration features also allow FuturesTechs to manage their users and enable or disable trial periods, and billing periods.

Learn more about financial research distribution with iPushPull here. Sign up for a free trial today!

February 26, 2016February 9, 2018

Financial Trading Conferences and Events in London

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

How human traders will beat the machines?

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

London Fintech Capital of Europe

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

Financial Trading Conferences and Events of 2016 in London

February 11, 2016

MiFID II is officially delayed by EU once again

EU has once again delayed the implementation of MiFID II to 3rd of January 2018 after ‘exceptional technical challenges’.

This is not the first time MiFID II has been delayed as the dreaded EU directive has many moving parts (collecting data from 300 trading venues and up to 15 million financial instruments) and has already changed directions many times.

Given the ongoing changes in the regulatory environment the team at iPushPull strongly believe that an investment in technology is more important than ever in order to help both research producers and consumers to deliver, track and monitor content.

Bloomberg’s MiFID II event “Spotlight on Independent Research”

Recently, we attended Bloomberg’s MiFID II event “Spotlight on Independent Research”. The main highlight of the Bloomberg Independent Research event was a keynote speech by Sandy Bragg, Principal of Integrity Research Associates, who was reporting the results of his recent survey on research pricing.

Integrity Research Pricing Study – independent research pricing and fee structures results:

Nearly 50% of firms showed revenues of less than $1mln in 2014. Integrity Research showed that the smaller the research producer the more likely pricing is pre-determined either fixed, by usage, or by product and because smaller firms have smaller revenues they have a preference and a need for cash payments.
Larger firms (in this case the 20% of those surveyed that had annual revenues of more than $10mln) have a preference for more lucrative fee structures that are based on opaque CSA’s. Essentially the larger firms rely on what the research consumer (traders/fund managers) offer to pay.

The independent research environment is closely followed as the more traders and fund managers are forced to pay for research that they consume, the more they will be forced to think about their research requirements.

Strategy consultancy firm Stratevolve estimate that 95% of electronically delivered research is not read, which means there is a lot of research out there that is surplus to requirement! This means research departments across the board are in the firing line.

According to the FT, Fund managers that have already stopped paying for research through commissions and pay research producers directly such as Baillie Gifford, Aberdeen Asset Management and Stewart Investors have all seen research costs fall.

This is not a good environment to be a research analyst but one silver lining in the cloud maybe that research analysts go independent and create a bigger market place for research which is why the last year has seen a few new research exchanges appear, with the likes of Research Pool, ERIC and Research Exchange looking to create an exchange of research.

With that in mind here is one Independent Research Conference you do not want to miss:

Global Independent Research Conference London on March 16, 2016 will help to create a community between buy-side participants and independent research providers. This conference is for the buy-side community including Portfolio Managers, Chief Investment Officers, Fund Managers, Strategists, Analysts and Chief Economists great way to get an insight into the state of the economy around the world for your investment decisions.

iPushPull for Research Distribution

To learn more about how research producers can track, monitor and deliver their research please visit iPushPull for Research Distribution

June 5, 2015June 14, 2015

Link global teams, aggregate global figures and create live reports in minutes

Case Study: Global Retail Company using iPushPull to aggregate figures and to create weekly reports.

The company has more than ten offices across the globe, from Australia to South Africa to the USA. Each of these sites generates sales figures and forecasts in MS Excel spreadsheets and submits them to head office in the UK. They used to do this by emailing the spreadsheets around – a laborious process, involving lots of manual cutting, pasting and cross-checking. Now they simply link global teams with iPushPull.

Using iPushPull to streamline the collation of their global sales figures they’re saving up to a day of tedious work each week. In fact, iPushPull has made the task so effortless that they’ve been able to move from weekly to daily reporting.

iPushPull let them automate this process with no disruption to their business. Here’s how they did it:

First, they created individual live data pages for each of their offices.
Next, each office installed the iPushPull Excel Add-In and modified their existing spreadsheets so that they push the key sales figures to their live pages the moment they’re entered.
Meanwhile, the users back at head office updated their master sheet so that the figures from the remote offices’ pages are pulled into it automatically.
The master sheet aggregates the global figures and generates a senior management report that’s always up-to-date and accessible on iPushPull’s desktop and mobile websites.

Our Access Management means that each office only has access to the data they need. And our audit tools let head office know when each office has updated their data and who’s updated it.

This approach has eliminated the manual work that was required to generate the sales reports, and it was achieved in about the same time it used to take to collate the weekly figures by hand! And since it’s been in place it hasn’t needed any maintenance – it just works. Having said that, should they want to modify the type of data they are sharing, iPushPull will make it easy. A new remote office opening? Add a new live data page and update the master sheet to include it. A couple more columns of information required from each site? Extend the ranges on each spreadsheet to include them and start pushing the data. All done quickly and easily with no development work or IT department involvement required.

Because iPushPull is such a flexible system with a broad range of potential applications, we always love to hear about the particular uses our customers are putting it to. Do you have a story to tell about how you’re using iPushPull? Please send it to us at support@ipushpull.com!