Dave Brown, President at IPC, details the unique offering of IPC’s Connexus Unigy communications tool.
What are the key changes you are making to your offering?
As a technology leader that is shaping the future of trading, we continually innovate our services and solution suite to ensure we are staying ahead of ever-evolving client requirements. Performance-engineered to deliver lower total cost of ownership and powerful new capabilities for global financial market participants, Connexus Unigy offers the advantages of IPC’s enterprise Unigy platform for unified communications and applications but in a dedicated cloud-based solution. For capital markets firms, future-proofing trading communications delivered in a dedicated private Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environment is a growing trend. It offers the benefits of SaaS without sacrificing security, compliance, or control.
Where do you see the greatest growth coming from over the next year?
It is inevitable that the growing institutional interest in and acceptance of new digital assets and technologies will generate significant demand from market participants such as the buy side, sell side and solution providers. In keeping with our approach to other asset classes and market segments, we will look to continue working with these market participants, connecting them to our ecosystem to support what we anticipate will be growing and potentially significant client demand.
As cloud and SaaS adoption increase, IPC continues to enhance and further improve Connexus Unigy which combines our award-winning Connexus Cloud infrastructure with our flagship communications platform by leveraging globally located data centres across our financial ecosystem. This offers our client base a flexible, customisable and adaptive communications solution designed for an organisation’s specific requirements.
What will be your greatest challenges and how will you overcome them?
Our greatest challenge remains constant – maintaining and enhancing our diverse, multi-asset, multi-participant global financial ecosystem whilst continuing to scale, adapt and respond effectively to the fast-changing markets. As such, our clients’ challenges are very much our challenges. Anticipating their changing requirements is pivotal to our continuing growth and success, whether in respect of greater cloud connectivity and integration, or in the case of buy-side participants particularly, delivering institutional-grade market access and intelligence.
What was the driver behind the recent launch of Connexus Broadcast?
Our partnership with Newsquawk, the market-leading multi-asset audio market data service, to develop and deliver Connexus Broadcast, is a great example of how we look for and collaborate with complementary service providers to deliver fast-to-market, innovative solutions that benefit our shared target market.
From client feedback we knew that technical and security restrictions on accessing social media and external information platforms (beyond traditional financial news publishers) on institutional trading floors meant traders were missing out on a lot of market-moving intelligence and sentiment. At the same time, buy-side traders typically can’t access the quantity and quality of news and market data available to institutional counterparts.
Newsquawk has proven, smart technology and analytical resources to gather and report news from hundreds of sources, including non-mainstream media. We have the ‘plumbing’ and connections to distribute it efficiently and effectively to our global community of 7,000+ financial market participants and 100,000+ users.
As such, Connexus Broadcast makes great sense on every front as IPC’s trading floor clients benefit from innovative, real-time audio delivery of tailored, multi-asset, multi-source market data and analysis directly to their desks.
What can clients expect from you over the next year?
IPC is committed to delivering greater innovation in communications technologies and a continuously expanding network of trading counterparts, particularly with respect to the burgeoning digital asset and crypto industry segment. Our market-leading brands remain front and centre of our client-centric business strategy and we’ll continue to look for synergies in other businesses, technologies and products that can further enhance our client value proposition with respect to global markets connectivity and trading communication efficiency.
What has winning this award meant for the firm?
We are thrilled that IPC and our Connexus Unigy service are acknowledged by the industry as a global leader. We are truly a customer-first business, committed to empowering our diverse and widespread user community to succeed with solutions that enable them to work smarter, not harder. Delivering flexible and scalable solutions in an environment of constant change allows organisations to be more nimble and agile to gain a competitive edge. As working patterns change, for example, the huge increase in demand for remote access to trading environments, we want to ensure that clients have all the tools they need to interact, transact, and react in our fast-changing global financial markets. The feedback we receive from our clients regarding Connexus Unigy, and this industry accolade, is a great endorsement of our client-first philosophy.
