Unified Communications in Financial Services

A community for debating the role of UC within the banks today and how it may progress in the near / medium term.

Retired Member 

The parable of the breakfast cereal - and what banks' Ops teams can learn from it

There’s an iconic TV advert in the UK for a breakfast cereal, where even the ‘hero’ can’t eat more than two Shredded Wheat. It was even cited by David Cameron when he was Prime Minister, when he declared he wouldn’t seek a third term. Created in the US in the 1890s, it was launched on an unsuspecting British breakfast-eating public as a “a relief ...

18 November 2019

Retired Member 

How banks can avoid falling foul of MiFID II reporting requirements

The red light is ‘blinking’ – but are you sure you’re recording? Investment banks know they need to record their trades or face the wrath of the regulator. However, too often it is taken for granted with everyone assuming the recording is happening … until the regulator asks for it and they can’t find it. In this blog I’ll examine why it is essent...

21 October 2019 /regulation

Retired Member 

Why banks’ DevOps can’t be all Dev and no Ops

‘Back office’ really doesn’t do justice to the pivotal role played by banks’ operations teams. It conjures an image of people dutifully beavering away to keep the lights on, happy for those on the frontline that is the trading floor to take the credit and glory. Nothing could be – or at least should be – further from the truth. In Accenture’s 2018...

09 September 2019

Retired Member 

How investment banks can respond to the fintech challenge

With the world’s largest institutions facing an existential threat from new fintech challengers, all eyes are on the DevOps team and their in-house lab to drive their own innovation in response. However, burdened with a legacy network and massively complex and interwoven 3rd party systems, banks’ DevOps teams are fighting on two fronts. Whatever...

15 July 2019 /devops

Retired Member 

What are some of the Customer Data Platform use cases for financial services sector?

1. Collection of data in its original form Frequent modifications on the original source data makes it difficult for marketers to pre-determine the use of data for their marketing strategies. So it is important to store customer data in its original form to ensure that the data can be useful in the future. A Customer Data Platform designed for fin...

26 June 2019 /wholesale

Retired Member 

How Ops teams can reclaim their weekends

It’s the weekend. The markets are closed and the trading floor has fallen silent. The usual cacophony of voices negotiating complex FICC transactions has moved on, making its way to a nearby bar where they can recount the week’s highs and lows. Only it’s not quite that simple. The trading floor may be quiet, but it’s not deserted. Markets may be ...

18 June 2019 /devops

Retired Member 

If a trade needs explaining, it needs recording

When Standard Chartered announced in its end of year results that it will include a $900 million provision for penalties relating to investigations into FX trading issues, trading compliance was once again thrust firmly into the spotlight. From electronic chat rooms to email, video calls to phone calls, there has been a constant fight by banking re...

03 June 2019 /regulation

Retired Member 

How many patches are you sitting on?

You could be forgiven for thinking this should be a rhetorical question – the answer is surely none? However, such is the scale and complexity of managing FICC voice trading systems, with all their interdependencies and interoperability requirements, that the reality is very much the opposite. The story of how IT departments are fighting a constan...

14 May 2019 /security

Retired Member 

How to lose USD 9 million in an hour

What’s in a call? In this world of algorithms and billions of dollars being traded in each second, the idea of a trade being done over the phone seems anachronistic. But for fixed income, commodities and currency (FICC) trading it is still all about voice trading using either a phone or Unified Communications (UC) platform. These exotic trades need...

02 May 2019

Patrick Chambeau Director of Marketing at IPC

The sell-side needs a collaborative workflow solution

Every day, several trillion dollars of securities are traded around the world, often executed in fast-moving volatile markets, as we have seen this week. Between 2000 and 2013, the size of the debt markets grew from $33 trillion to over $90 trillion, and the U.S. treasury debt doubled from $4.5 trillion in 2007 to over $12 trillion in 2014. The dai...

18 October 2018