In recent months ipushpull has onboarded several new Capital Markets customers. In each case, the customer has selected a cloud-deployed instance of ipushpull hosted on Amazon Web Services, our cloud partner, for their financial markets workflows.
While the adoption of the cloud is widespread in other industries, enterprises in financial markets have long been reluctant to deploy to the cloud. Concerns around security, regulatory compliance and data privacy are commonly cited, not to mention pre-existing investment in expensive on-premises infrastructure. But this landscape is changing as market participants recognise that cloud can be cheaper and more secure than on-premise, and as they begin to appreciate the many additional advantages that cloud services bring. For example, one key feature of cloud services that are frequently raised during our conversations with our capital markets network is the availability of sophisticated computing resources such as machine learning and AI – resources that are difficult to replicate internally.
Even the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) has given its seal of approval to cloud vendors and is “seeking to leverage the cloud in order to improve service value and control risk”. They “see no fundamental reason why cloud services cannot be implemented in a manner that complies with [their] rules”. This progressive view towards the cloud, by one of the world’s leading regulatory bodies, further helps to drive cloud adoption. In turn, this helps to drive innovation across huge banking digital transformation projects through faster time to market, better agility and almost infinite scalability.
Cloud deployments are also particularly suited to the kind of cross-market data distribution and buy-side/sell-side workflow automation applications enabled by ipushpull. The cloud provides the simple connectivity that’s essential for implementing real-time data workflows between sell-side and buy-side counterparties and enabling the secure distribution of reference data to thousands of consumers.
ipushpull is core to the risk management process at Amplify Trading, the global trading and trading education provider, where they use our service for real-time position tracking and risk aggregation across their global trading team. Traders in multiple locations push live trading data to ipushpull, where it is aggregated and used to generate live reports for risk and portfolio managers. Will de Lucy, Amplify’s Managing Director, says:
“The ability to access critical information from any location and on different devices means the team can also monitor live prices in real-time in and out the office”.
Workflows with other customers include real-time axe distribution and reference data-as-a-service (DaaS). While the specific workflows may be different, in every case the cloud approach has enabled fast onboarding and rapid, iterative implementation, thereby providing a competitive advantage.
Attitudes to the perceived risk of the cloud are changing, computing power is growing, and machine learning and data analytics are adding value to the business. And as costs continue to fall the cloud will continue to rise. To find out how ipushpull can help you in your cloud journey, please get in touch.
