Last week saw the return of the European leg of Fixed Income Leaders Summit, held in Nice. The event is billed as the largest buy-side fixed income trading summit, and last week certainly didn't disappoint. It was a veritable who's who of trading firms, and a great range of topics were covered, from the future of trading systems to the innovation impacting the liquidity landscape. However, we wanted to share our personal highlights and insights from the conference.

The democratisation of data

One theme that kept repeating itself in every session and networking discussion was the challenge of making data more accessible across all institutions. In order to help reduce the operational burden on staff who spend most of their day sharing data with team members and clients.

This is a theme we are hearing too. Increasing access to data seems an obvious step to address this issue but it can be hard to achieve in practice, with many organisations resorting to emailing or sharing via FTP large volumes of data. ipushpull has taken a different approach, connecting your data to a myriad of endpoints, such as Symphony chat, Microsoft Teams, Excel or APIs. This allows teams to continue to invest in existing applications they use today and extend the functionality to support the use of real-time data on demand.

Monetise your data

Closely linked to the first topic, many institutions are looking to further monetise their data by making it available to clients. This is leading to an opening up of more trade opportunities as clients become self-sufficient, logging their own trade queries without the need to speak to a trader directly.

Again, this is an area where ipushpull is very active right now. We're seeing customers looking to enhance services through the use of chat, or more specifically chatbots, to allow clients to query an institution's data directly. This is a hugely exciting area which promises to be a game changer.

Operating in volatile markets

Data and workflow become paramount in fast, dislocated markets. When liquidity is limited it's essential to be able to connect all available data sources and make that data available in the right place so it can be used efficiently. The work spent automating manual repetitive tasks becomes even more valuable as that time becomes available to deal with the urgent tasks and decision-making to hit the desk. Making sure you retain information from chat and voice communications will also be a valuable data resource for the future and to analyse performance during extreme conditions. ipushpull offers seamless data connections and the ability to provide access to the right data, at the right time and in the right place.

As ever, we found spending a couple of days networking with peers hugely beneficial. We're already looking forward to the next event, we hope to see you there too!

Until next time...