Archives: News Room

New York – May 29, 2024 – IPC, a leading provider of trading communications, electronic trading and infrastructure solutions for global financial markets, announced today that as part of a planned leadership transition Kurt Adams will succeed Bob Santella as CEO. Additionally, Stuart C. Harvey, Jr.  has been appointed Chairman of IPC’s Board of Directors and Michael Chin has been named an IPC Board Member. 

Adams has more than 25 years of leadership experience in the financial and technology industries, most recently serving as CEO of Optum Financial. Prior to joining Optum in 2019, Adams was group president and CEO of corporate payments for Fleetcor Technologies, Inc. He has also held leadership roles at U.S. Bank, Elavon Financial Services, Piper Sandler and the ABN AMRO Bank. 

“We want to thank Bob for his leadership and partnership over the last six years.  With SVP becoming the sole owner of IPC, this is an opportune time for Bob to pass the torch to Kurt, who is well suited to lead IPC through its next stage of growth. We are excited to work with Kurt on this exciting journey, and are grateful for Bob’s contributions to help IPC become the business it is today,” said Jonathan Waggoner, Managing Director at SVP.  

“I am excited to embark on this journey with IPC’s dedicated team. Our focus will remain on delivering exceptional value to our customers by expanding upon our innovative trading technology to create a more connected experience and fostering a culture of customer-centricity to remain at the forefront of the financial services industry,” said Kurt Adams, incoming CEO at IPC. 

“The future of IPC is extremely bright,” Santella said. “I depart with the deepest appreciation for the support I received from our owners, Board of Directors and an incredible team of employees across the globe who strive to deliver the best products and customer service in the industry.” 

New Board Positions Also Announced 

As part of the executive leadership changes, Stuart Harvey has been named Chairman of IPC’s Board of Directors and Michael Chin has been named an IPC Board Member, effective immediately.

Stuart Harvey’s multifaceted background spans capital markets, financial technology, payments and related software businesses.  He has previously served as CEO of Elavon Global Acquiring and Ceridian Corporation and as president of Piper Sandler.  Stuart has also chaired the board of directors of Paysafe Group and Wageworks and serves as the current Chairman of Flowbird (Paris, FR) and Weave Communications (NYSE: “Weav”).   

Michael Chin currently serves as CEO at DUCO and has been a part of leading organizations such as Broadway Technology, Refinitiv, Mantara, TradingScreen and JP Morgan. Michael’s industry experience and expertise for innovation bolsters IPC’s position for future success.   

22 May 2024, London/New York – IPC, the leading provider of secure, compliant communications and multi-cloud connectivity solutions for the financial markets, has joined forces with global communications surveillance tech firm VoxSmart to significantly enhance the accuracy and efficiency of multilingual transcription technology for financial institutions.

Drawing on cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) technology and using real-life conversations had by capital markets professionals, the partnership is set to transform how financial markets operate. Offering a 50-fold increase in speed compared to previous transcription technologies, the new capability will deliver unparalleled accuracy in real-time transcriptions across all financial languages.

The new technology empowers front office trading desks and sales teams to seamlessly convert real-time audio into structured data, permitting them to integrate insights into trading blotters, order management systems, and CRM applications. This integration opens doors for the development and implementation of proprietary large language models (LLM) and natural language processing (NLP) applications.

The news arrives on the heels of remarkable advancements in AI and large language modeling. These breakthroughs enable transcription innovators to create more robust and precise engines. It couldn’t come at a more crucial time for financial institutions, which face increasing regulatory scrutiny on communications reporting. With billions in fines already levied for non-compliance, the need for highly accurate multilingual AI transcription technology has never been more pressing.

Oliver Blower, CEO of VoxSmart, said: “Voice-based communications are the lifeblood of many over-the-counter markets. Until now, they’ve been blind spots for many firms, posing challenges not just for compliance monitoring but also for uncovering valuable business insights. Our partnership with IPC seeks to change that, equipping financial institutions with the ability to effortlessly meet evolving compliance requirements while gaining a competitive edge by bridging communication gaps in rapidly expanding markets.”

James Tonks, SVP Partner Development, IPC commented: “Our partnership with VoxSmart marks a significant leap forward in the realm of financial communications. By combining our secure, compliant communication solutions with VoxSmart’s advanced AI-driven transcription technology, we are not only enhancing compliance capabilities but also empowering our clients with unprecedented real-time insights and operational efficiency. This collaboration is a testament to our commitment to innovation and excellence in serving the financial markets.

New York and London – May 1, 2024 – IPC, a leading provider of trading communications, electronic trading, and infrastructure solutions for global financial markets, announced today that it has won the A-Team Innovation Award for Most Innovative Team for its new OneView Portfolio solution for the trader voice market.

OneView Portfolio is a new service launched in Q4 2023. Resolving a core challenge in the financial trading environment, the OneView Portfolio facilitates efficient management of fragmented and often disconnected trading workflows that run in and across multiple applications and platforms. With the ability to natively access and run both IPC and third-party applications, as well as integrate seamlessly with OpenFin-enabled desktops, IPC’s OneView Portfolio, which comprises the OneView Device and Workspace, ushers in a new generation of trading performance. Designed for the most complex trading and cross-enterprise environments, it satisfies growing industry demand for a more robust and optimized voice user experience.

CEO, IPC Systems, said: “We are particularly thrilled to receive this award, reflecting the innovation shown by the OneView development team led by our CTO Tim Carmody. OneView aligns our industry-leading trader-voice technologies with our open-architecture approach to applications integration, bringing unprecedented flexibility, agility, and efficiency to the voice trading community. We are delighted that A-Team’s expert judging panel recognize our continuing technological innovation supporting what is still a significant and active global trader voice market.”

Carmody commented, “OneView seamlessly integrates voice activity with myriad transaction processing applications and enterprise workflows. With the OneView Device and Workspace, managing and streamlining workflow has never been easier. We are proud to offer our customers a solution that is both powerful and intuitive, providing them with a competitive edge in these ever-evolving markets.”

Full winner’s report here

IPC is back in the SST Awards winners’ circle after winning this category in last year’s SST Awards, although this time it is thanks to its OneView Portfolio offering as opposed to its ubiquitous and highly decorated Unigy platform. Key to OneView Portfolio’s success is its tight integration with OpenFin, allowing capital markets professionals to access and exchange information across desktops, platforms and devices. IPC knows a thing or two about how traders think and work and this new addition to the IPC stable will no doubt gain traction quickly as firms look to maximize their traders’ effectiveness, while simultaneously ensuring seamless information flow throughout the organization.

“This prestigious award is very welcomed and an industry acknowledgement both of our longstanding commitment to providing better, smarter and faster solutions to the global financial trading community, and to the continuing enrichment of the user experience in terms of our own industry-leading solutions, and through seamless access to and interoperability with the best third-party applications and platforms available today” – Tim Carmody, executive vice president and CTO, IPC Systems

London, 14 March 2024 – IPC, a premier communications and compliance solutions provider has announced a strategic partnership with Business Systems Ltd (“BSL”), a leading provider of compliance and customer experience solutions, to support organizations to future proof their data management strategies.

IPC has added Wordwatch, Business Systems’ cutting-edge Communications Compliance Management solution, to its Trading Communications Systems portfolio, providing its financial institution clients with efficient access to a unified management interface. This interface facilitates enhanced data accessibility, supports regulatory compliance, enables end-to-end management of interaction communications, and facilitates decommissioning of legacy voice recording infrastructure.

James Tonks, SVP Partner Development, IPC said: “We are always delighted to partner with industry leading solutions that complement our service offering and enhance our customer experience. Wordwatch is a great fit with our strategy and focus on communication workflow integration and enhanced data management delivery.”

William Davenport, Chief Sales Officer at Business Systems, commented: “We are delighted that IPC has joined our Wordwatch partner ecosystem, offering organizations an innovative solution to tackle data management challenges and to maximize the value derived from their voice and interaction data.”

Matt Ludlow, Head of Channel Partner at Business Systems, added: “’This collaboration fortifies our commitment to delivering innovative solutions to our clients. Wordwatch brings advanced capabilities, enabling organizations to navigate communication compliance seamlessly. Together, we empower businesses with efficient tools, ensuring regulatory adherence, streamlined communication management, and a phased approach to decommissioning legacy voice recording infrastructure.”

IPC’s Trading Communications Systems support the global voice trading community through a comprehensive suite of leading-edge communications technologies and tools, underpinned by its proprietary and award-winning Unigy® Platform. Trading Communications solutions include Service-as-a-Software offerings (Connexus), on-premise and mobile trading communications products and compliance and surveillance solutions. IPC’s most recent Trading Communications innovation, the OneView Portfolio, was launched at the end of 2023 and offers unparalleled integration and interoperability of voice-traded workflows within a single device and consolidated workspace.

Business Systems’ Wordwatch solution seamlessly ingests and manages both legacy and live communication recordings from any platform. It consolidates this data into a centralized ‘single pane of glass’ portal, empowering organizations to extract greater value from their interaction data.

ATLANTA, NEW YORK and LONDON –  Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (NYSE: ICE), a leading global provider of technology and data, and IPC Systems, a leading provider of trading communications solutions, today announced plans to launch ICE Voice, a cloud-based audio solution that will be offered with ICE Chat to provide a seamless communications platform for traders and other market participants.

ICE Voice will bring together ICE Chat’s extensive network of over 120,000 active users and IPC’s Connexus Unigy private cloud platform to provide always on, persistent open connections between individuals or groups of traders across internal trading desks and with any other ICE Chat user signed up for the service. Users will be able to instantly jump from chat to voice and open calls from chat tabs and group chat rooms, and create Voice Blasts to ‘shout out’ to groups of open connections simultaneously. ICE Voice will also support full audio recording with configurable retention, anywhere, anytime playback of archived calls, and integrated chat and voice logs to create a single record of communications, aiding in trading desk or firm-wide compliance programs.

“For the first time, ICE’s users will have a single, integrated platform for chat and voice that matches both traders’ need for always-on, instantaneous connectivity with other traders, and firms’ desire for easy-to-access and use records that help them meet their record retention requirements,” said Maurisa Baumann, Head of Desktops and Feeds at ICE. “ICE Voice builds on our instant messaging service, which has become one of the largest networks in the financial industry, and utilizes IPC’s voice network for providing cloud-based audio connectivity with a single click.”

“IPC’s collaboration with ICE to develop ICE Voice brings our industry leading Connexus Unigy cloud technology together with the ICE Chat network to create a single, seamless and powerful solution for traders,” said Tim Carmody, Chief Technology Officer, IPC Systems. “This solution reinforces both IPC and ICE’s focus on continuous innovation in trading communications and connectivity, and enhancing the experience of the global trading community through greater integration and interoperability between chat, voice and electronic platforms, applications and workflows.”

ICE Voice will be seamlessly integrated into the ICE Chat platform, providing an efficient workflow for financial professionals to connect and interact as effortlessly as possible. It will combine voice connectivity with functionality that was designed specifically to match the custom needs of traders, including ICE Chat’s AI-powered Smart Text Recognition functionality, which turns texts into actionable data using APIs, and Message Blaster for sending single messages to multiple contacts.

IPC’s Trading Communications Systems support the global voice trading community through a comprehensive suite of leading-edge communications technologies and tools, underpinned by the proprietary and award-winning cloud-based Connexus Unigy platform. Trading Communications solutions include Service-as-a-Software offerings (Connexus), on-premise and mobile trading communications products and compliance and surveillance solutions, including its most recent solution, OneView Portfolio, which launched at the end of 2023.

New York and London, December 5, 2023 – IPC is delighted to announce its certification as an accredited Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect Partner. As a member of the AWS Partner Network (APN), IPC can offer efficient and effective access to AWS resources, and other AWS Partners through its award-winning Connexus Platform, to an extensive global financial markets customer base to support electronic trading activities and market data management.

Leveraging IPC’s core Network-to-Network Interface (NNI) with AWS, IPC customers now have even faster, more secure, and efficient access to AWS services. Customers can connect directly and on a managed, hosted, or dedicated basis to AWS, with flexible bandwidth options (50MB to 100G).

AWS Direct Connect is a networking service that provides an alternative to using the internet to connect to AWS. As an AWS Direct Connect Partner, IPC can provide its customers with benefits such as seamless, low latency connectivity compared to standard internet connectivity, coupled with high-service resilience and availability, underpinned with industry leading, high-performance Service Level Agreements.

Tim Carmody, Chief Technology Officer at IPC said: “We are delighted to be accredited as an AWS Direct Connect Partner and to empower our customers’ cloud journey with secure, reliable, and fast connectivity to AWS. Our extensive global network of financial markets participants can take advantage of scalable, seamless access to cloud resources – and other AWS Partners – that can flex to their own business needs.”

Oslo, Norway – November 28, 2023 – Smartoptics, a leading provider of optical networking solutions, today announced that IPC Systems, a provider of secure, compliant communications and multi-cloud connectivity solutions for global financial markets, has selected Smartoptics to meet high-performance customer requirements for electronic trading. The Smartoptics solution offers low latency combined with simple management, short lead times and competitive pricing.

LONDON AND NEW YORK – November 21^st, 2023 – IPC, a leading provider of electronic trading, trading communications and ‘as a service’ infrastructure solutions, has added a European derivatives exchange to its expanding portfolio of connected exchanges and trading venues.

IPC customers using Connexus Extranet can now access market data across Fixed Income, Equities, Equity Indices, ETF/ETCs, FX and Crypto. Firms such as market makers, high frequency trading firms, quant and program trading firms requiring ultra-low latency data delivery and distribution can further benefit from data server co-location within IPC’s Equinix FR2 data center facilities. Businesses located in other major financial data centers can access market data through IPC’s global connectivity and colocation ecosystem.

In line with its focus on simplifying global financial markets connectivity and normalizing multi-source market data, IPC customers can access market data from multiple liquidity venues through a single API, with minimal incremental charges and without the need to manage myriad Exchange Mandated Changes. Further, on-net connectivity to global exchanges can be achieved in just days, subject to exchange and trading venue approvals.

IPC’s continuously expanding, electronic trading network seamlessly connects more than 75 exchanges and trading venues with more than 7,000 diverse capital market participants and 200,000 individuals in 60 countries worldwide.

Performance engineered specifically to support electronic trading, Connexus Extranet facilitates interconnectivity and communications between capital market participants, application vendors, liquidity venues and content providers. A single API connection to the Connexus Extranet ecosystem links all connected parties together for efficient communications, transactions, and market data (and information) distribution.

John Owens, Director of Global Exchange Relationship Management, of IPC Systems said: “This addition to our expanding portfolio of market data brings significant cost savings and faster time to market for our customers. Through a single connection, firms can connect directly with more than 75 global exchanges and trading venues and hundreds of trading counterparties within our secure, compliant, and fully managed service. Alongside data management workflow efficiencies, trading participants further benefit from reducing both capital expenditures (CapEx) and operational expenditures (OpEx).”

This expanded coverage follows IPC’s recent partnership with Celoxica to deliver a low latency normalized multi-venue and asset market data service through a single API, in fully hosted CoLo or customer-specified data center locations.