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Digitisation of Pre-Trade Client Workflows

Pre-trade

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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New Initiatives Around Standardisation and Automation in Capital Markets

Standardisation and automation in capital markets

By Matthew Cheung, ipushpull

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

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

Data interoperability through open source

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

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

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

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

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

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

A welcome development

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REGISTER HERE

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Moving towards future state in capital markets – The Financial Technologist

future state in capital markets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data-as-a-Service

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

post trade

post tradeJames 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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

  1. ‘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.
  2. 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Traders working from home

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.