By Brendan Bradley
Imagine your personal life without your favourite messaging App(s). As a society, we have gone from, “You don’t write anymore,” to “We don’t talk anymore,” to “Ping me!” To the point where a whole new language (not programming) has developed, from acronyms to slang. For FOMO everybody needs to understand the given connotations ASAP!
Within financial markets, the use of messaging platforms has been alive and well for many years. For example, Instant Bloomberg (IB) Chat has been widely used in the financial industry for communication, collaboration, and information sharing among sell-side and buy-side professionals. The ability of IB Chat to facilitate price formation and negotiation, whether via RFQs or IoIs, subsequent affirmation and confirmation and post-trade settlement enquiries, is something that trading venues have noted, and some have mimicked.
Furthermore, trading venues can significantly benefit from the use of chat platforms to enhance communication, facilitate execution, manage risk, and streamline post-trade processing. In addition, we have previously highlighted how chatbots and large language models (LLMs) have the potential to revolutionize chat platforms for trading venues. They can help to improve the user experience, make the platforms more efficient, and provide traders and brokers with the insights they need to make better investment decisions.
Suffice to say that market participants are adopting new models to exploit the changing technology while maintaining the advantages of traditional workflow in markets. This is particularly true when liquidity is fragmented or market participants are generating strategies and pricing in real time, pulling live data from various sources and presenting complex strategies to their clients as single executable products, or executing large volumes as block trades. Of course, ipushpull Solutions are well positioned to collaborate with exchanges/trading venues to deliver an omnichannel approach, incorporating chatbots, rather than members/clients accessing data from multiple sources manually.
Of course, for those venues or market participants that are late to the party, it could be argued that they should collaborate with third-party chat platform providers, such as Slack, Symphony, WeChat etc; allowing them to bring a chat platform to market more quickly without the time and expense of building from scratch. To mitigate this significant pain point and development risk ipushpull has developed an omnichannel chatbot service (Client Chatbots - ipushpull chatbots in Symphony, Teams and Slack) that further enhances chat platform usage. By making a one-time configurable, no-code connection from a data source such as Excel or a database, or by connecting via API, consistent client workflows can be delivered across multiple chat apps with unified monitoring and permissioning and without any further specific integration work required. This removes a great deal of risk for the venue in terms of the build cost, choice and order of chat platforms with which to integrate and the time to market.
Furthermore, vendors like ipushpull can collaborate with cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, who recently announced Amazon Bedrock, democratizing Foundational Model access for developers to easily build and scale generative AI-based applications, using familiar AWS tools and capabilities. This further allows venues to overcome the challenge of incorporating their business knowledge into LLMs to deliver accurate and relevant responses.
In short, for venues and liquidity management providers that are not on board, that ship has not sailed, the train has not left the platform and there is time to play catch up quickly. As a reminder, are you missing out on the ability to provide your members/clients with an ecosystem to share:
The potential of chat platforms and chatbots in trading venues and OTC trading platforms can revolutionize how traders communicate, execute trades, manage risk, and access market insights. By embracing the capabilities of such technologies (not forgetting the further benefits of incorporating LLMs and generative AI), trading platforms can enhance customer experiences, streamline operations, and create a more dynamic and efficient marketplace for financial instruments.
Welcome to the future of trading on venue and in OTC markets. Head to ipushpull Solutions to discover more.
Contact us today to find out how you could benefit from ipushpull.