Among English-speaking countries early school days usually focus on Reading, ‘Riting and ‘Rithmatic – long considered the basics for a sound education. Addressing three different “R”s is critical for sound trading communications – Resiliency, Reliability and Risk.
Resiliency should be designed and engineered into every aspect of a best-in-class trading communications product. Otherwise, you likely wouldn’t purchase it in the first place. Any trusted provider of communication services will not only ensure your resiliency requirements are met, they’ll also configure and maintain your business continuity solution to help protect from multiple failures and events outside of your control. Service assurance is paramount, and these Rs are critical to ensure continuous, uninterrupted trader communications.
But, what about risk? What level of risk is your firm able or willing to tolerate? And do you have the right technologies in place to deliver these risk safeguards?
Without a doubt, if reliability and resiliency are done well, a big step has already been taken to reduce risk. However, things still break and systems occasionally exhibit failures – be wary of anyone giving a 100 percent guarantee that issues won’t occur. What is imperative is that when issues arise there’s minimal downtime to your end users and a minimization of impact to your firm’s servicing of customers or alpha capture.
Fortunately, today there are innovative companies applying advanced technologies to monitor – 24×7 – hundreds of elements of a firm’s trading communications and voice recording (VR) systems. Firms providing these services are differentiated in the level of engagement they commit to provide when critical fault notifications are received. A premium monitoring offer can provide:
- Alerts when critical faults occur in a unified communications platform or voice recording system that notify your service provider to engage with technical resources that can resolve the issue.
- A direct indication of the type of fault and where the fault exists to enable quicker action to remedy the issue
- An always-there response as to what problem has occurred and what actions are being taken to fix the issue and minimize disruption to your mission-critical operations
With ever-increasing compliance requirements, mounting pressure to reduce costs and the ever-present need to ‘protect the business,’ why leave your firm open to risks that are simple to avoid? Subscribing to a monitoring and response solution can provide you peace of mind that enables you to focus on your core business needs.
Maybe it’s time to do a little homework on the value of your monitoring solution, and consider a more effective monitoring option; one that includes engagement from the experts. Mastering the three Rs of trading communications right now can go a long way toward achieving operational consistency and ongoing profitability.
