Digitalising Financial Markets with Data-as-a-Service

How ipushpull cloud-enables firms to seamlessly share live, streaming, and on-demand data with Data-as-a-Service.

There have been many unpredicted outcomes from the current COVID-19 pandemic, but one of the more interesting ones has been the rapid acceleration of digitalisation. How rapid? Well, earlier this year, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella stated that they’d seen two years’ worth of digital transformation occur within the space of two months, something that was inconceivable at the start of the year. While IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna said “history will look back on this as the moment when the digital transformation of business and society suddenly accelerated”.

Like many other industries, the financial markets sector, with so many staff confined to working from home in 2020, has suffered severe disruption to existing workflows, forcing firms to readjust their working practices.

But with every challenge comes opportunity, and the savvier firms are looking not only at how to get through the current situation, but how they can transform their business for the better over the longer term by utilising Cloud – and specifically Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) – as an enabling technology.

What is DaaS & what can it offer?

Data-as-a-Service provides the ability to seamlessly connect your data to the right person, at the right time, in the right application. This means that you can share your data – which could be sitting in a database, in a platform, or even in a spreadsheet – with your clients, your counterparties, or your colleagues, directly into applications they’re already using. Excel spreadsheets, chat platforms, chatbots, even internal platforms via an API, for example.

ipushpull’s approach to DaaS is to integrate into both legacy and cloud-based technologies, enabling firms to access and share live, streaming, and on-demand data across the entire trade lifecycle, from the front office through to the middle and back office.

To offer a few examples, live data might be an investment bank distributing live ‘high touch’ bond axes to the buyside’s spreadsheets, OMS or chat platform. Streaming data could be where a market-maker is constantly updating quotes from an internal pricing engine, or a broker client workflow of publishing real-time prices to clients in a ‘call around market’. And on-demand means that end users can pull the most up-to-date data from any data source. Ops users may be pulling down the latest list of ISINs to match to RIC codes for example, or risk managers might need to see live P&Ls in Symphony or Slack.

All of this needs to come with the requisite enterprise security, control, and audit necessary for financial markets.

Embracing the Cloud

Historically, data sharing in capital markets has been problematic. Either it’s been done manually, through emails, file sharing, and copying/pasting data – which is then very hard to streamline, automate, and audit – or firms have had to use expensive developers to connect data together, with none of it being ‘out of the box.’

ipushpull bundles all the data and tasks that were spread across spreadsheets, email and file shares into a new structured flow into any connected application. Utilising the Cloud as an enabling technology means you can share data inter as well as intra company. You can share data to trigger workflows with external clients, customers, and teams, and do it in any application via plug and play. And using the Cloud means it’s incredibly scalable, it’s significantly cheaper than trying to build it yourself, and it has a fast time to market.

The Cloud also offers several commercial benefits for both the suppliers of data and the end-users. From the end-user perspective, only paying for what you need allows you to match and scale your operational costs more closely with your trading activity, for example.

Beneficial use cases

Where our customers already have the data and the platform, but may lack the distribution into end-user applications, they have successfully used ipushpull either for the first or the last mile of connectivity.

The first mile is where data may be unstructured or sitting in an application or system that generally does not have any external connectivity. By connecting into ipushpull, data can be securely pushed into the Cloud and then made available elsewhere.

The last mile is about getting data into the applications or tools that your clients or your teams already use, so nothing new needs to be installed. That data can be coming directly into spreadsheets, into chat, or collaborative apps such as Symphony or Slack, or straight into your internal blotters or platforms that you might be using for that last mile of distribution.

Importantly, nothing is on-premise. Everything happens via the Cloud. Rather than engage costly development teams, or rely on manual processes where someone has to copy and paste from one application to another and send it to a counterparty who is doing something similar – a process that involves lots of manual tasks, emails, spreadsheets, copy/pasting and the like – by moving to this new way of data sharing, it unlocks both technical efficiency and automation, which means your staff can spend their time on higher-value activities or things that only humans can do such as being creative, complex decision making or speaking to clients.

A growing number of firms, including panelists from our recent webinar, such as NatWest Markets and Euromoney TRADEDATA, are now utilising different flavours of the examples given above. All of them are using ipushpull to accelerate digital initiatives to widen digital distribution channels and provide better experience for their clients and workflow efficiency and automation for end-users.

Conclusion

The digitalisation of these types of use cases will become more commonplace as people question why they are still using manual processes or one-off development projects to share data. As Data-as-a-Service becomes more prominent and firms look for technical efficiency and automation, we’ll see this new way of sharing data becoming the norm.

We see it already in the digitisation and electronification of OTC markets, where manual processes make way for standardised delivery of prices and workflow, but why stop there? Live data sharing can be ubiquitous internally across the firm, and externally to clients and counterparts – all of this being accelerated by the Cloud and by integrations into financial networks like Symphony, Refinitiv, Bloomberg, Broadridge, DTCC, Markit, etc.

In the post-COVID landscape, there is no new norm anymore. There is only a future state. As working practices change, workflow needs to be more efficient, and data needs to be easy to access, secure and access-controlled.

As we move towards live data-driven workflows, people need to be able to seamlessly connect to data in any application in real-time, at the right time, at the right place, and from any location.

We’re seeing Data-as-a-Service being adopted across sales and trading, between sell-side and buy-side, and across technology vendors. All of them are providing a better and more efficient experience for their clients.

It’s time to move away from manual processes, emails, spreadsheets, and copy/paste and away from embarking on expensive development projects to connect data from one app to another. Instead, look to incorporate Data-as-a-Service into your digital transformation projects or as a new digital distribution channel.

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

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

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

June 19, 2018June 19, 2018

ipushpull joins BT Radianz Cloud, simplifying cloud connectivity & adoption

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more information please see the BT press release here.

January 16, 2018January 16, 2020

Full list of 2020 London FinTech events, meetups & conferences

2018 London FinTech Events and Conferences

Despite the challenges the UK’s economy has faced in recent times associated with Brexit, the FinTech sector continues to go from strength-to-strength. With this continued buzz it’s no surprise that London will be full of interesting and exciting fintech events and conferences in 2020.

Last year beat the record for UK fintech investment, with the average total investment in firms growing by 33% in 2019, in comparison with 2017. London alone has seen a record year with over $2bn of funding – more than New York. With the continuing presence of large global financial services firms and easy access to capital, London is the place to be for startups. ipushpull, UK based FinTech company providing live data sharing and workflow auotmation, is one of many London-based companies benefiting from the wide array of opportunities on its doorstep.

We’ve compiled a list of all 2020 London fintech events and conferences happening across the city. Stay on top of these opportunities to move your business ahead of the competition in 2020.

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

2020 London FinTech Events and Conferences to attend

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

October 18, 2017October 18, 2017

Innovation in RegTech for Financial Services

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The companies that are innovating in RegTech for Financial Services

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

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

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

The changes the market faces and the challenges/opportunities

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

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

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

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

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

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

February 23, 2017February 23, 2017

Brexit Effects on UK FinTech Ecosystem

Ever since the Brexit vote, the FinTech industry has been busy trying to determine what it could mean for their business. There were high hopes that Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech would provide some clarity but it only hinted at what agreements might be struck. UK-based banks are considering moving staff abroad, VC investments in FinTech are decreasing drastically and there’s confusion over the future legislation for cloud services. So which of the Brexit effects on UK FinTech ecosystem will cause the most disruption?

An outline of Theresa May’s objectives:

Uncertainty and Brexit Effects on UK FinTech

The loss of EU Passporting rights, which enable financial service businesses to operate freely across 28 EU nations, is the most obvious threat to financial services companies. Leading London based banks such as HSBC and Morgan Stanley are planning to shift affected departments to Paris and other growing European financial hubs such as Dublin and Frankfurt. However, this isn’t anticipated to be a major issue for FinTechs. Only 20% inquire with regulators about passporting rights and only a fraction of those need them.

The decline in UK FinTech investment is having a more chilling effect on startups. While global Fintech investment grew by 11% in 2016, investment in the UK fell by 34%. This is anticipated to lead to some contraction in the industry as companies are forced to tighten their belts. However, the picture is more nuanced – while the total value of deals declined, the total number of deals actually increased in 2016, partly as a result of the declining value of sterling. And the UK still remains third in total investment in the world, behind China and the US at $532 million. It’s clear that if a company is still building a competitive product, then the investment is still available.

EU legislation for cloud services is centered around the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which strengthens data protection legislation for individuals. The UK Government confirmed in October that, despite Brexit, it still intends to implement GDPR. Although the terms of Britain’s separation from the EU are still unconfirmed, it seems likely that the UK will continue to enforce compliance post-Brexit and will seek confirmation from the European Commission that the UK’s laws are equivalent to the EU’s. So any companies planning to invest in GDPR compliance should continue to do so, as the effort will not be wasted.

Opportunities for British FinTech Firms outside of Europe

It’s still possible to find opportunity in a crisis – this is exactly what FinTech firms need to do. Though things are still unclear on the future relationship with the EU, the UK is looking to strike new trade agreements with other countries.

Say NÇ HÇŽo to China and OlÃ¡ to Brazil!

The UK has been busy looking at forming agreements with China, Brazil, the Gulf States, Australia, New Zealand, India, and the United States. This will open up whole new markets for British-based FinTech firms to explore. Companies that can adapt to new regulatory regimes the fastest, speed up transformation and develop increased efficiency in challenging conditions will come out on top. The financial services sector is predisposed to thrive in uncertain conditions. The last financial crisis has led to the development and growth of some of the most successful FinTech companies in London. Therefore, Brexit provides the opportunity for innovation and will spur the development of new solutions.

Next Steps for FinTech Firms

It’s time for some due diligence. It’s important for UK-based firms to determine where their clients are or where they could be coming from in future. If the majority are based in Europe, it could be worth exploring setting up a virtual office in one of the growing EU tech-cities like Amsterdam or Dublin. It’s also important to keep an eye on regulations that might change when UK leaves the EU.

At iPushPull we’ll continue to apply the highest regulatory compliance to the protection of our customers’ data thoughout the Brexit process, so that our financial services customers can continue to be compliant as the political landscape changes. Sign up for a free trial or contact our sales team for more details today.