Regulation.
The little word, that’s done a lot to the capital markets industry. It’s also a word that has changed the nature of how financial markets participants communicate, report and trade. The trade lifecycle now involves more participants – not only because of the need for more transparency – but firms, both on the buy and sell sides need to continue to differentiate their services to remain competitive.
That means they’re hiring more economists, research staff and analysts, who in addition to compliance, need to be actively engaged in front-office activities. They need to see and hear more instantly from on site , off-site and abroad. This call to arms for a set of tools and applications to address this movement away from only traders working in a vacuum is becoming a requirement.
We do know one thing: non-traders are not traders. Research and capital markets analysts may not instinctively understand well-worn and fast-paced technology like turrets. They’re not tech experts either. So, if they aren’t traders, and they aren’t tech experts, then we have to look at them in another way: as consumers.
Consumer technology has grown from a one-device universe to a multi-platform multiverse. Multiple devices now have multiple functions. They even in fact, share functions. As a consumer I can now watch a movie on my TV, my computer…even my phone. I’ve gone mobile, whether it’s through a mobile platform like Sling Box, or mobile apps like Netflix and Hulu. So the question becomes, how do we share functions that were once for a hardware-based turret to consumer-like technology – how do we take the trading floor functionality… well off-floor to a mobile trading platform, an app, or a soft turret?
And, how do we live in a world that is increasingly algo-driven with:
Less phone
More internal discussion
Open architecture
There actually is an app for that.
For these researchers, analysts, compliance officers, and economists, the most common consumer technologies are already designed to function off-floor. Tablets and smart phones actually have the capability to house tools that process real-time activity, instantly. So, in order to answer the call for these new participants to be engaged in the trade lifecycle, vendors will need to develop mobile trading platforms and apps to live within consumer-like hardware.
Just as I wouldn’t rely on sitting in front of a desktop to have full data functionality, traders no longer need to sit at their turret. They can actually, use a mobile trading platform, a mobile trading app, or a soft turret that exhibits the same functionality they’ve come to know as a trader, or can easily understand as a non-trader.
In essence, a mobile solution that features options like a phone or tablet app, trading platform device and a PC based soft turret ultimately allows the firm to:
Increase productivity while lowering TCO
Connect everyone on the trade lifecycle via integrated hoot and intercom, anywhere, anytime
Provide customizable options based on each user’s needs. Not to mention that putting your turret in your bag at the end of each day would be pretty difficult.
