Delivering live axes directly to buy-side clients through chat and Excel

The issuing of axe data used to involve the sales team building their own connectivity to each customer. On the receiving end, each investor had to build connectivity with all their dealers, which was usually infeasible due to cost. With such a high volume of data being traded daily, the data is often out of date, leading to missed trades.

NatWest Markets wanted to send axes to a repository which could then distribute the data to clients with minimal effort required on their part.

NatWest Markets began to use Symphony and has been building bots on the messaging platform for automating functions, including execution, RFQs, and sending prices to clients. Clients now contact sales, whilst talking to the client, sales can connect to ipushpull and share live data via Symphony or a web page, which requires no installation for the client and is quick and easy to deploy.

For example, a salesperson can find out in a chat that a client is interested in axes for the auto sector and send this specific data to Symphony or Excel. In addition, during the conversation, the salesperson can update axes in real time and send the data on demand. Or a client may ask for the top five axes in banks in a Symphony chat. The salesperson can select those axes and publish them straight into Symphony, and the client can execute any trades using an execution bot. The bot automatically sends the trade to straight-through processing without requiring any manual intervention. Clients benefit from receiving accurate, real-time data. For example, when axes were distributed by email, they might not be acted on for a few hours,  by which time they would be stale.

As a result, it has become much easier and quicker for the NatWest Markets sales team to distribute axes as they are streaming in real time.

In addition, sales teams at NatWest Markets previously had to manually collate axes in a file and distribute en masse to clients via third-party platforms. Using ipushpull allows the bank to tailor axes to clients, who receive the data in a format which can be fed automatically into their order management system.

Natwest Markets started using ipushpull in credit, recently expanded to rates and has seen client demand expand into foreign exchange.

NatWest Markets is now looking to implement bots within the client’s chat application to work alongside the sales team. Bots will help automate day-to-day requests for axes information, freeing up the sales team to focus on higher-value client relationship activity.

In addition, NatWest Markets is looking to push more data into the ipushpull environment to give greater access to market data in a controlled manner. This will allow clients to query more data and see different views, giving richer interactions each time.