Enhancing chat through standardisation of data

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

Standardisation of data – one syntax

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

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

Artificial Intelligence

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

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

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

February 6, 2019

ipushpull named in top ‘100 FinTech influencers’ 2019 for second year running

London, UK – 6^th February 2019: For a second year in a row ipushpull has been named as one of the “100 Most Influential FinTech Companies”by a judging panel of experts from the financial community, published in the Financial Technologist Magazine by Harrington Starr. This year the panel has included influential thought leaders from a range of diverse backgrounds in finance and technology, including David Williams, Partner, Financial Services Technology Advisory at EY; Lee Tindell, CTO Business Technology at Man Group; George Morris, Partner Information, Communications and Technology at Simmons & Simmons. Brought together with the aim of identifying how technology can tackle problems faced by the financial industry, the FinTech influencers list celebrates those companies which provide industry solutions that matter and the ones to watch.

ipushpull is delighted to have been given this distinction and named in the top 100 influential FinTech companies once more. During the past year ipushpull have been working hard to identify even further, the use cases and challenges that are facing capital markets. The FinTech has been working with a variety of buy-side and sell-side firms as well as IDBs and financial software vendors to provide award winning workflow automation solutions eliminating manual, complex process often involving emails and file sharing.

Matthew Cheung, CEO of ipushpull, comments:

“We are delighted to be recognised as a FinTech influencer for the second year running highlighting the transformational work we are doing with tier 1 banks, brokers and funds in capital markets workflow automation and real-time interoperability”.

Through a suite of real-time integrations connected by the cloud, ipushpull allows real-time collaboration, workflow automation and interoperability between any application. Frequently, the disparate systems within financial services and the lack of interoperability between applications exposes the need for better, faster data and more efficient workflow. The solutions developed by ipushpull solves these issues while removing expensive in-house development.

About ipushpull

ipushpull (https://www.ipushpull.com/) is a cloud based real-time data sharing and workflow automation platform. Used across sell-side and buy-side, and front to back office, ipushpull improves workflow efficiency by allowing cross application secure, audited, access-controlled live data sharing, collaboration, and workflow automation. The API first platform handles static, live, and streaming data with APIs, integrations, and connectors into many data platforms and services. The platform has won numerous including the inaugural Symphony Innovation Award and FIA Innovator 2018. The company is a member of the highly selective JP Morgan In-Residence Programme. For more information visit ipushpull.com.

Contacts

ipushpull
Matthew Cheung
CEO
+44(0)2038084805
info@ipushpull.com

June 19, 2018June 19, 2018

ipushpull joins BT Radianz Cloud, simplifying cloud connectivity & adoption

Fintech brings real-time data sharing and collaboration to the world’s largest secure networked financial services community. ipushpull is pleased to announce a strategic alliance with BT Radianz creating opportunities within the Radianz community to further accelerate the company’s growth.

Through a single, resilient and secure network the award winning BT Radianz Cloud links a financial community of thousands of banks, funds, brokers, exchanges, clearers and settlement houses to over 400 market critical providers and vendors. By partnering with BT Radianz ipushpull significantly simplifies cloud deployment and infrastructure connectivity allowing quicker sales and onboarding to an established customer network. While BT Radianz benefits by offering its customers cutting edge and innovative technology alongside its existing list of top tier vendors.

Like many Fintech vendors ipushpull utilises cutting edge cloud based technologies and hosting. However financial institutions have not been quick to adopt cloud computing. This is due to a number of factors, namely:

Security, banks are heavily regulated so security of internal and customer data is paramount so ‘on-premise’ hosting is the norm
Legacy infrastructure, billions has been spent on technology infrastructure, as well as the staff to maintain it, making banks reluctant to jettison decades of investment
Education around the cloud, historically the cloud has been seen as a consumer technology lacking enterprise grade security, however this just isn’t the case

Some financial institutions have embraced the cloud or have made moves to but they are still outliers. The majority of financial institutions still request that Fintechs deploy on-premise installations which are not only costly to deploy and maintain they often lack the benefits which the cloud brings such as scalability, reduction in cost and connectivity. As BT Radianz is a well-established provider of cloud services through their private network, or extranet, the decision to partner with BT Radianz was led by the credibility, security and network that Radianz can provide to its existing financial services customers. Matthew Cheung, CEO of ipushpull comments:

“While Fintechs are agile and nimble and able to quickly create innovative market-ready technologies they are often dealing with financial institutions who, due to their size, are slow to adopt and deploy the latest technology. BT Radianz Cloud allows Fintechs like ipushpull to seamlessly connect with the big financial players at speed, at scale and with the highest level of enterprise security”.

Through Radianz Cloud, financial institutions can now access the ipushpull data sharing and collaboration platform allowing data interoperability from applications like Excel, databases and APIs to messaging platforms such as Symphony and Microsoft Teams and desktop containers such as Openfin and ChartIQ – all utilising the ultra-secure private network that the Radianz Cloud provides.

For more information please see the BT press release here.

June 4, 2018June 4, 2018

How Fintech is Improving Back Office Efficiency

While the banking industry is excited about the transformational affects of AI and blockchain there are bigger and faster gains to be had now with far less investment. Innovative fintech firms are already providing huge gains in workflow efficiency by eliminating manual processes in the back office.

Historically, only the alpha producers had access to the latest technology in order for them to keep a competitive edge. However, this hasn’t always been the case in the back office of a bank. Operations has often been starved of technology and instead has relied on legacy systems and architecture with the de-facto fall back to emails and spreadsheets to support their processes. A typical bank operations department may send hundreds of thousands if not millions of emails each day. Any improvement in this workflow can add up to a significant cost saving at scale.

Automation in Operations – Human or machine?

Operations is the lifeblood of a bank and vital to how a bank functions. Their job is to ensure seamless transactions, payments and settlements to reduce any risks the bank could be exposed to through discrepancies, out trades, or losses.

With the huge amounts of data that is generated and consumed end-to-end, fully-automated straight-through processes are the ideal state. However, automation is not always possible.

At a strategic level, banks needs to decide the appropriate level of process automation to the task in hand. Fintech firms such as Duco can fully automate and significantly increase the speed of processing and reconciling large amounts of trade data. However, the exceptions process often requires complex human interactions across different sets of data, applications and databases and multiple communication platforms (chat, email, phone).

These human interactions cannot be automated and are slow, manual and costly, which result in:

Overly complicated error prone workflows
Lack of integration because of legacy systems
Communication challenges with offshore operations departments
Lack of visibility

Improving workflow efficiency

Fintech firms are providing unique and elegant solutions to these interactions around data. The fintech ecosystem has accelerated the unbundling of Bloomberg which has affected both the front and back office. Operations departments now have access to workflow applications such as Symphony and ipushpull which, when used together, eliminate email and file sharing and provide a unique way of collaborating and approving data. Fintech’s use of API-first technologies means there is no need for banks to rewrite or replace legacy systems and architecture. Instead, fintechs provide interconnectivity between applications and interoperability of data reducing manual or double entry of data by connecting data across spreadsheets, databases and internal or third party systems.

Fintechs are improving back office efficiency allowing cost savings by integrating existing and future workflows without large investment, automating processes, and making human processes more efficient.

To learn more about how ipushpull is being used to eliminate emails and file sharing and streamline processes with real-time approvals and alerts, please go to www.ipushpull.com.

February 12, 2018

New Grid release for Better Live Collaboration in the ipushpull Web App

The January 2018 release of the ipushpull Web App brings you brand new functionality and existing feature updates for an even better live collaboration tool – The Grid.

With the new Web App Grid you can now copy and paste any data directly into your ipushpull pages. Invite your team or clients to your page and collaborate on shared data within a browser in any location, bringing Google Sheets type functionality into every grid based application.

Share data to applications such as Slack, Excel or WordPress and with the AutoSave feature, your updates are published immediately to all connected integrations. AutoSave improves automation and efficiency saving you time and enabling better live collaboration. Or choose to Push manually when you are happy with your changes, for more control over your data.

Track any live data updates or changes made by your team and see exactly which values are important with easy to see highlighted cells.

With the new Web App Grid, you can apply Range Access Controls – this means within one page of data, different users can be permissioned as view only, edit or no access. So with an access controlled centralised source of data on ipushpull there is no need to worry about the wrong person seeing the wrong data.

Better live collaboration for intranets or private member areas

Have an intranet site to collaborate with your team or share data with clients? Once you embed an ipushpull page, your team or clients can collaborate in real-time in a secure, audited, access controlled manner or could even make changes to embedded data on a webpage that can be linked to VBA and formulas hosted in an Excel model.

Embedded data can now also be sorted and filtered as well as queried to return the right answers when you need to make immediate decisions.

With responsive design, set your pages to be viewed exactly how they are meant to be, in your website or WordPress page. Use the ipushpull Generator in WordPress to create quick shortcodes for your pages, or find your ready made HTML shortcode through the ipushpull Web App.

October 18, 2017October 18, 2017

Innovation in RegTech for Financial Services

Since the 2008 financial crisis, governments and central banks have introduced a vast array of new regulation for the financial services industry. This has led to the emergence of a new type of FinTech start-up, “RegTech“. RegTech (regulatory technology) refers to either a firm or group of companies that use technology to help businesses comply with regulations efficiently and inexpensively. In practice this can include a wide variety of services, ranging from easing regulatory reporting, to risk management, and communication monitoring and know your customer or client (also known as KYC).

If RegTech is a relatively new phenomenon, why has it had such a rapid emergence in the last few years? There seem to be several key factors that have led to this meteoric rise to relevance:

Governments and regulators have been extremely keen to pass new legislation to control the activities of banks. With many financial institutions scrambling to comply with MiFID II by January 2018 as well as GDPR looming. This has led to somewhat of a regulatory spaghetti, with developed markets seeing a 492% increase in regulatory changes between 2008 and 2015.

This has been exacerbated by a historic under-investment during the ‘light touch’ regulatory environment before 2008. Banks tended to hurry to deal with a specific regulation as it came along, rather than overhaul their systems to deal with the longer term regulatory challenges. Compare this to the dreaded MiFID II which has created a near $100bln dollar market for companies serving the gap in front to back office MiFID II compliance.

The third contributor to the rise of RegTech has been expense. Post-crisis fines have exceeded $200 billion, and as such the ongoing cost of regulation and compliance has become an industry-wide concern. On top of this, by some estimates competition with FinTech firms is expected to put $4.7 trillion of revenue at risk. This means that banks are incredibly keen to adopt new technologies to stay ahead of the curve.

And finally, whilst in the past innovation in financial markets was driven by the banks, it is apparent that a culture shift is underway. This has led to a greater level of innovation occurring in FinTech startups and RegTech for financial services with London leading the way in RegTech investment.

The four key reasons outlined above, have led to the perfect storm brewing. The last ten years have provided an excellent environment for new innovators to enter the market to help established financial services institutions deal with regulatory burdens.

The companies that are innovating in RegTech for Financial Services

Onfido – A RegTech start-up founded by three Oxford University graduates that helps banks with client onboarding, anti-money laundering, and KYC. They allow banks to digitally verify people’s identity using machine learning technology, allowing verification to take minutes rather than hours or days.

Credit Benchmark – Also founded in 2012, Credit Benchmark specialises in pooling, aggregating, and anonymising credit risk data from leading global banks. This allows financial institutions to make better risk management and capital allocation decisions.

ipushpull – recently named by Data Management Review as a Top 10 RegTech Startup, offer a cloud service and workflow tools that allow businesses to share data and other information seamlessly, without using email attachments or file sharing. ipushpull helps MiFID II pre-trade transparency around quote dissemination by voice brokers and provide compliance in hours, not months. The company also supports MiFID II research budgeting, allowing users to monitor and track research consumption and optimise budgets.

The changes the market faces and the challenges/opportunities

Whilst the past few years have shown that RegTech has great promise, let’s have a look at what’s going to happen over the next few years. Here are the challenges:

Scalability – whilst many RegTech solutions may work on a small scale at start-up level, can they be scaled to deal with the issues present in financial services firms with hundreds of thousands of members of staff.
Integration – will specific RegTech solutions be able to integrate effectively with incumbent’s legacy solutions.
Compliance buy-in – will compliance departments sign-up to products that might eventually make their line of work redundant?
Preference for legacy systems – will RegTech start-ups be able to convince incumbents to move away from their legacy systems? Because whilst inefficient and outdated, there may be a preference for the tried and tested.

However, whilst there are undoubtedly challenges, all should be able to be dealt with. Marc Andrews, vice-president at IBM’s Watson Financial Services Solutions states that:

“It [RegTech] has the opportunity to drive a dramatic step change in how organisations are addressing regulatory compliance, and to transform regulatory compliance, both within financial services organisations and in the industry as a whole.”

Such a view is supported with research by Financial Services Roundtable, who stated that global demand for RegTech is projected to reach $118.7 billion by 2020. Accenture expect opportunities for RegTech to provide workflow managing, tracking, and evidencing solutions, envisioning demand for more sophisticated visualisation and reporting capabilities to assist with internal oversight activities.

With the rise in regulations over the previous ten years, added to by a range of other factors, the stage has been set for RegTech to succeed. Whilst there are some challenges that must be dealt with, the future for RegTech is bright.

September 28, 2017September 28, 2017

ipushpull at Symphony Innovate 2017

The ipushpull team is excited to be heading to New York for the annual Symphony Innovate conference on October 4^th 2017. Come and visit us at our booth for a demo of our popular Symphony integration and find out more about how our customers are using it. And don’t miss our CEO, Matthew Cheung, participating in the Operations Panel alongside

other thought leaders from the technology and investment banking worlds, discussing how Symphony’s technology is optimising communications internally and between financial institutions.

#SI2017 Symphony Innovate – The Event Itself

Symphony Innovate 2017 is a one-day conference led by Symphony, in which industry-leading technology and financial executives, engineers and thought leaders from around the world are brought together to discuss how technology enables the ‘power of community’ for the financial services industry. The event will see executives from leading technology firms and investment banks such as Google and Goldman Sachs, take the stage alongside executives from FinTech firms such as ipushpull.

At Symphony Innovate ipushpull will showcase its Symphony app, which combines secure enterprise messaging with live data sharing and collaboration. Whilst Symphony provides an alternative to email and outdated, expensive enterprise messaging applications, ipushpull provides a replacement for file sharing and email attachments and facilitates easy-to-use cross-platform data sharing and collaboration.

About ipushpull

ipushpull is a secure cloud service for sharing and collaborating on live data which links directly into the apps our customers already use, including Microsoft Excel, Symphony, websites and mobile. We help our customers to:

Improve workflow: by sharing data and removing the need to share files, users can work on data inside of existing applications they use – which means no application context switching or version control problems
Increase efficiency: improving collaboration and communication by always having access to the most up-to-date information
Reduce risk: eliminating the risks of file sharing by controlling, tracking, and reducing email attachments

The partnership with Symphony means ipushpull is embedded within the Symphony messaging platform. The ipushpull app for Symphony lets you share data with your Symphony network, collaborate on it, and link it in real time to your spreadsheets, databases, cloud services and internal systems.

About Symphony

Founded in 2014, Symphony is a secure, cloud-based, messaging and collaboration platform with a $1 billion+ valuation and over 200,000 users. Symphony has been backed by major investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley, and has become hugely popular amongst financial institutions across the globe. Security and compliance is at the core of the platform while end users benefit from improved workflow efficiency by replacing email communication and legacy chat platforms.

Since its founding, Symphony has allowed its partners to integrate HTML5 applications within its platform, thus enabling developers to build rich user experiences, and facilitate collaboration whilst minimising context switching. The ipushpull App extends Symphony’s capabilities by enabling users to collaborate on data within the platform in real-time.