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Enhancing chat through standardisation of data

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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Automating Data-Driven Workflows in Financial Markets

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

REGISTER HERE

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Digitalising Financial Markets with Data-as-a-Service

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.

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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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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Enabling Data-as-a-Service on Legacy Platforms

Enabling Data-as-a-Service on Legacy Platforms

In a previous blog, we wrote about the competitive edge that data-rich financial institutions and solution vendors can gain by offering ‘Data-as-a-Service‘.

But what are some of the key considerations when it comes to cloud-enabling a firm’s existing legacy platforms? How difficult is it to offer live data or real-time data sharing through commonly used desktop apps such as Excel?

A bank, broker or asset manager might want to take on-premise data that sits on an internal platform – trade data for example – and seamlessly share that to the cloud, thus removing the need for end users to be onsite or to remote desktop in via a VPN.

Or a solution vendor with products designed for on-premise installation or access via dedicated lines and specific client software, might wish to go cloud-based in order to offer real-time or on-demand data sharing into existing applications and workflows without its customers having to rely on clunky FTP or building to APIs.

The good news is that enabling Data-as-a-Service on these legacy platforms is not as difficult as it might seem.

 

Enabling Data-as-a-Service on Legacy Platforms –

Real-time data sharing in the real world

Amongst financial institutions, many firms, on both the buy side and the sell side, are looking to gain greater leverage from their own internal systems by cloud-enabling them, thus improving the service they offer to internal colleagues and external clients. Whether that’s through making real-time data available within chat and collaborative workflow apps, feeding live data to and from Excel or sharing data via other desktop apps, there are many benefits that such an approach offers.

A good real-world example of this is the e-commerce fixed income department of a well-known bank, which uses its own internally-developed platform to generate trade axes from its current bond inventory. Working together with ipushpull, the bank has cloud-enabled this internal platform with secure, real-time data sharing, so that customers are automatically updated with new trade axes via their own choice of desktop apps (such as Symphony or Excel) and can respond with indications of interest directly from within those apps.

From a solution vendor perspective, there are many companies that have fantastic products and services, but live data sharing is restricted by the fact that their customers need to have software installed onsite or can only access data through FTP or API integration with a centralised service. A number of these vendors are now seeing the benefits of cloud-enabling these platforms to offer Data-as-a-Service.

Again, it’s worth citing a couple of real-world examples.

The first is a risk solution vendor that offers intra-day margin calculations. They have a great product that enables customers to load up their position data and calculate span margining for those positions on the fly. However, the product was originally designed to be installed on premise at the customer’s site, which made it expensive and meant that it could only be sold to larger institutions. By working with ipushpull to create a multi-tenant version with a secure cloud presentation layer, the vendor can broaden the service out to a wider, more diverse customer base and offer more affordable subscription-based or on-demand pricing models.

The second example is a data vendor that has a centralised multi-tenant platform, where customers download large data files and upload trade files via secure FTP. Again, their legacy installation and onboarding process meant that their commercial model was limited to larger customers. ipushpull helped the vendor cloud-enable this service to make the data available on demand, which has now opened up the service to a much wider group of potential customers.

 

Seamless integration of data sharing tools

The common thread with all of these legacy systems is that they handle data, with a set of inputs and outputs. And there is no fundamental, technical reason why they should not be cloud-enabled with data sharing tools.

This is what ipushpull does. At the front end, we deliver these systems as true services with a unified presentation layer via the common desktop apps that people are already using. At the back end we develop APIs that plug into these legacy technologies. From the perspective of both service providers and end users, this is a completely seamless process. Services  connect to ipushpull via the cloud and we take care of the rest, i.e. marshalling the data, providing access controls, presenting the data into multiple desktop apps and marshalling data back and forth to the service from within those apps in real-time.

Service providers benefit from not only being able to offer live and on-demand access through desktop apps like Excel, Slack, Symphony, Microsoft Teams and Eikon messenger, desktop containers like ChartIQ Finsemble and Openfin, and internal platforms and applications like pricing engines, risk systems and OMSs, without have to completely re-platform their existing systems, but also being able to deliver data-driven custom notifications into those apps based upon user-defined parameters.

In summary, Data-as-a-Service offers many benefits, and there is no reason that firms should be restricted to on-premise deployment or to API/SFTP integration. By working with a trusted partner such as ipushpull, firms that are looking to cloud-enable their internal platforms can minimise their internal development costs, broaden their reach and rapidly accelerate their time to market.

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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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Enabling Data-as-a-Service on Legacy Platforms
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ipushpull pre-trade workflow solutions a hit at Investment Association’s ‘Power Pitches’

pre-trade workflow

On the 2nd of June ipushpull participated in The Investment Association (IA) Engine Innovators Power Pitches, where cohort 3 of the buy-side focused Engine programme showcased the latest technology solutions for asset managers and hedge funds.

The Engine programme is a Fintech accelerator and hub that gives a platform to best-in-class Fintech innovators, connecting innovative, proven solutions with the investment management sector. In particular, as COVID-19 has highlighed the importance of technology and innovation in ensuring business endurance and growth, agility and scalability is now more crucial than ever for competitive success of organisations of all sizes.

A line up of 5 Fintechs, chosen by the heavy hitting IA Engine advisory panel, presented their solutions for 3 minutes each, highlighting how they can assist firms and bring in efficiencies, lower costs and enable opportunity. The webinar also included an engaging interactive panel of Q&As.

The IA Engine cohort 3 speakers included:

ipushpull – Matthew Cheung, CEO

Exabel – Neil Chapman, CEO

Fundipedia – Simon Swords, MD

KiteEdge – James Flavin, CEO

Rungway – Julie Chakraverty, CEO/Founder

Notable speakers also present:

The IA – Gillian Painter, Head of membership and Engine

M&G Investments – Siobhan Clarke, Chair of the Engine Advisory Panel and Head of International Investment

 

Pre-trade workflow solution for OTC trader presented by ipushpull:

For the 3 minute pitch, CEO Matthew Cheung explained how ipushpull can enable fully digitised data driven workflows on a trading desk. To showcase how ipushpull can be implemented, Matthew described the severe inadequacies in pre-trade workflow for non-standard OTC trades. To solve these, organisations can streamline their workflows and move away from the inconsistencies and inefficiencies of spreadsheets and emails. ipushpull allows organisations to reduce operational risk and manual touchpoints for a faster, more efficient investment process. Embracing data-driven workflows enables exponential data flywheel effects – faster feedback loops means more data, provides better insights, creates better workflow. All of this can be done without any development work and instead by ‘levelling up’ existing technology.

If you would like to find out more about this solution or the ipushpull platform please get in touch: sales@ipushpull.com

 

 

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How can data-rich financial institutions and vendors provide ‘Data-as-a-Service’ to their clients?

Data-as-a-service

Banks, inter-dealer brokers, funds and financial data vendors maintain unique, and in many cases live, data sets. This data could provide a competitive edge to clients if it could be easily shared with them

It has become something of a truism that data is a valuable commodity in today’s economy. Particularly so in the financial markets sector, where the quality and timeliness of the data can have such a massive impact on the outcome of trading and investment decisions.

Data-rich firms, such as banks producing trade axes, inter-dealer brokers making prices, commodities firms quoting spreads, reference data firms providing the latest symbology and market risk analytics platforms sharing risk metrics are therefore in a strong position. Financial market participants are hungry for unique, high-quality, accurate and timely live and on-demand data, and willing to pay a premium if it gives them a competitive edge.

Increasingly however, end clients are looking for their counterparts, vendor and service providers to offer more data. They want a better user experience by being able to access live data on-demand, and to be able to easily access and integrate the data within their existing applications and workflows, with minimum disruption. They also want more flexibility to pay only for what they use rather than being forced to subscribe to large data sets.

These demands can be tough for data producers to meet. But for those able to rise to the challenge, many opportunities can open up in terms of new services they can offer, new business models they can capitalise on, and new types of clients that they might not otherwise be able to service.

 

Living in the past

The traditional model of live data delivery to end users in the financial markets sector – still prevalent at the majority of financial institutions – is via dedicated desktop applications or browser-based services where, with the appropriate licence agreements, users can access the relevant data and where specific functionality is provided within those desktop or browser applications to view and work with the data.

This is all well and good but somewhat restrictive from the end-user’s perspective. Sales and Traders generally use a range of core applications in their daily workflow, such as various pricing & analytics tools, spreadsheets such as Excel, and chat apps such as Bloomberg IB chat, Eikon Messenger and Symphony, for example.

The problem arises when they want to work with live data using these core tools rather than those offered by the data producer (that’s if the data producer even offers such tools). Typically, there’s no easy way to connect the former with the latter, so generally they have to rely on inefficient or expensive ways to get the necessary data into their own applications, ranging from copy and paste between applications (prone to error and no longer real-time) or downloading CSV files (very clunky), to building API connections (very expensive), with only the latter offering anything close to live data or real-time automation.  So what’s the alternative you may ask?

 

Data-as-a-Service

In response to growing demand for more accessible data (exacerbated by covid related remote working) , data producers and service providers are increasingly looking at how to offer “Data-as-a-Service”(DaaS). But they need to be more intelligent than just providing users with access to a massive database and giving them the ability to select the subsets of data that they want over existing channels.

As its name suggests, DaaS is not just about the Data component. Data producers need to give equal – or even greater – weight to the ‘Service’ element, as this is where they can really differentiate themselves. Particularly as a younger generation of millennials are now entering positions of seniority within firms, with higher digital demands than the old guard. In the B2C world, these “digital natives”have become used to accessing the information they want, when they want it, in their chosen format, on their own device, and to be able to immediately act on it. Increasingly, they expect their B2B providers to offer similar levels of service.

With the right DaaS approach, data producers can satisfy these demands, to really set themselves apart and capitalise on this changing dynamic. But there are three key challenges they need to overcome:

First, they need to make it a lot easier for clients to pull data from data producers into their own core applications, without having to resort to significant – and potentially costly – API development or working with flat files.

Second, they need to build value-added services around two-way data flow, where clients are not just consuming their data, but acting on it and sending data such as prices or bot commands back from their own core apps.

Third, they need to adapt their business models to reflect what is happening in the B2C world, because this is increasingly what clients want, e.g. tiered subscriptions or usage-based licences, rather than an all-or-nothing approach.

 

Data-as-a-Service enablement

In the past, building these types of DaaS capabilities would have incurred significant development, particularly if the data producer relies on legacy technologies for its own data collection, storage, normalisation and distribution.

Fortunately, DaaS-enabling technology now exists that makes it possible for data producers to achieve all of this without having to re-architect their own data platforms.

ipushpull, for example, enables data producers to rapidly connect their service to a cloud-based platform and deliver standardised two-way interfaces and plug-ins into popular client desktop, chat and workflow apps used within the Financial Markets sector. Combining this with features such as data-driven notifications delivered into those same apps (so that the user is automatically alerted when key events occur), ipushpull can offer a genuinely new and superior client experience.

The benefits to this approach are significant not only for external data producers but for delivering in-house data and functionality internally as a service in the same way.

In-house systems can leverage this approach across a wide range of use cases by improving live risk, position and P&L monitoring across desktop and mobile apps, syndication desks seamlessly sharing flow to sales desks or speeding up trade exception management, for example. Data and service providers, as well as gaining a fast and cost-effective way to deliver data to their clients, also benefit by being able to offer more commercial flexibility and a far better user experience to their clients. And by being able to both push and pull data to and from their clients, they gain greater insights that enable them to develop new services around data sharing, data enrichment and workflow automation, for example.

By embracing this powerful, agile new approach to DaaS, data-rich financial institutions and vendors can now adopt more flexible commercial models while keeping ahead of the ever increasing demands of their clients.

 

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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The Investment Association selects ipushpull to be part of new UK FinTech accelerator

UK FinTech accelerator

Powering the progression of tech adoption within the investment industry

LONDON, April 21st, 2020: ipushpull, a leading enterprise platform that improves efficiency by allowing secure live data sharing and workflow automation, is pleased to announce that they have been chosen by The Investment Association (IA) to be part of its latest FinTech hub ‘Engine‘.

The accelerator programme will connect best-in-class FinTech innovators with investment managers looking to transform the industry. It will act as a catalyst for industry transformation and bring together focused tech solutions.

Matthew Cheung, CEO of ipushpull, said:

“We are delighted to be part of the IA’s unique programme driving greater adoption of new technologies across investment management. ipushpull and our data-as-a service solution has been recognised for innovation, quality of solution and our focus on key industry problem areas within the investment industry.”

ipushpull transforms data-driven workflow and improves efficiency across capital markets with real-time data sharing and workflow automation, delivering fast time-to-market and cost savings for data producers and services.

Working closely with the buy-side, the data as a service solution standardises and automates workflow using an innovative approach of bots and widely used chat applications. ipushpull has seen a dramatic increase in adoption of these solutions as buy-side traders are forced to work from home due to COVID-19.

John Macpherson, Deputy Chair of the IA Engine Advisory Panel, comments:

“We have certainly witnessed transformational changes over the last couple of months and have seen technology enable firms to operationalise and compete in these unusual and difficult times. We’re thrilled to offer ipushpull access to our industry-recognised programme and excited at such new and innovative technology which the IA can showcase to trading desks of UK based asset managers“.

ipushpull will work with the IA and harness the industry expertise of its partners and networks. Also, as part of the eight-month accelerator program, the participants will receive mentoring from an industry-expert Engine Advisory Panel to help unlock potential for solutions throughout the sector, including Schroders, Aberdeen Standard Investments, Insight, Legal & General, M&G and UBS Asset Management.

Alongside ipushpull, the firms chosen are Exabel, Fundipedia, KiteEdge and Rungway.

 

Media contact for ipushpull

Melanie Budden

The Realization Group

+44 (0)7974 937 970

Melanie.budden@therealizationgroup.com

 

Media contact for The Investment Association

Katie Martin, Head of Communications: Katie.Martin@theia.org

44 (0)20 7831 0898

Press@theia.org

 

About ipushpull: 

ipushpull is transforming data-driven workflows and improving efficiency across capital markets with real-time data sharing and workflow automation. The Data-as-a-Service platform delivers fast time-to-market and big cost savings for data producers and services, providing unified, access-controlled data distribution into client applications (Custom Apps, Excel, Symphony, chat bots, notifications, APIs) and streamlining high-touch processes across the trade lifecycle with the ipushpull no-code custom applications and bot framework.

For more information about ipushpull and our solutions visit www.ipushpull.com.

 

About The Investment Association (IA):

The IA champions UK investment management, supporting British savers, investors and businesses. Our 250 members manage £7.7 trillion of assets and the investment management industry supports 100,000 jobs across the UK. Our mission is to make investment better. Better for clients, so they achieve their financial goals. Better for companies, so they get the capital they need to grow. And better for the economy, so everyone prospers. The UK is the second largest investment management centre in the world, after the US and manages 35% of all assets managed in Europe.

For more information about The Investment Association visit www.theia.org.