Andrew Capewell: Welcome to another edition of the ipushpull podcast. My name is Andrew Capwell, Head of Product, and I'm joined today with, by David Jones, CTO, and Neil Wetherill, Head of Technical Sales. David, Do you want to introduce yourself a little bit about your background and what you do here at ipushpull? Yes,

David Jones: I'm David Jones.

David Jones: I'm the CTO, one of the co founders of ipushpull. So I'm responsible for the technical strategy of our company. I oversee the development process for both our front end and back end components. And because we're a small company, I take a lot of interest in the sort of day to day technical implementation.

David Jones: Of the solutions that we're building for our customers.

Andrew Capewell: Thank you, David. And Neil, do you want to talk a little bit about yourself?

Neil Weatherall: Hi, my name is Neil Wetherill, and I'm head of technical sales at iFishpool. Prior to joining iFishpool, I spent a number of years working on the sales side on trading desks.

Neil Weatherall: From that, I've had a lot of experience of sitting and trading, working with sales, working with brokers, and I try to use that knowledge and experience combined with our product to provide solution for our customers. Great, thank you so much.

Andrew Capewell: So today we're going to be talking about the new web app that we've slowly been launching to customers over the last couple of months and we are looking forward to launching it to more customers going forward.

Andrew Capewell: We're going to talk a little bit about why we built it. There's some of the principles that we used in order to understand customer requirements, the technical innovation that we've included in the product, some of the really exciting tools that we've used, and why it sets us up in a really cool place for the future to expand on our customer offerings and where we can go.

Andrew Capewell: So David, I suppose the first question is, why did you feel we needed a new web app? And what's what's the kind of the key thing you wanted to achieve by doing it?

David Jones: Sure. Thanks, Andrew I think you know traditionally a lot of our customers have used the iPush pull service through our chat integrations or through our integrations with excel or even directly through our API So Our previous, you know, our previous web app was not being sort of broadly used to run workflows, but over the past couple of years, we've had increasing interest from customers and prospects to be able to run quite sophisticated financial markets workflows within the context of the web app, and it became clear that what we've built over the previous 10 years in terms of our web app, while it's very suitable for the the traditional sort of data sharing workflows that we initially focused on.

David Jones: When somebody wanted to try and do a complex workflow from the web app it was clear that the existing app was not really flexible or extensible enough for us to be able to, to model workflows within that kind of framework. In one of the key parts of the ipushpull platform, Is this ability to build workflows?

David Jones: So what we can do is we can construct a workflow that allows multiple people to take part in a multistate workflow together. So it could be something like an RFQ workflow where you've got a client asking one of their counterparties. for a price for a particular product. Our bot integrations allow you to model that really really easily, but it just wasn't possible to do this within the web app.

David Jones: So that's why we took a very long, hard look at what we had in place initially, originally, and thought that rather than trying to extend it any further, we needed to start again using modern frameworks. Modern best practices and bringing in like third party components, industry standard components like AG grid, which we'll talk about a bit more later to allow us to build something that was stable and extensible for the future.

Andrew Capewell: Great. That's really interesting. Neil, you work with customers on a daily basis. You listen to their feedback. You understand quite deeply in your role how customers use like push pull and more generally how. Our customers and clients are that the workflows that they have currently in place and some of the way they can be digitalized.

Andrew Capewell: Can you talk about a specific example of where you've been able to do something really cool and interesting that you weren't necessarily able to do previously?

Neil Weatherall: So I think the best example is something that's fallen within a sort of package solution that we call QuoteHub. Essentially, this is where we're displaying price or quote or order data on a screen in a sort of whiteboard type fashion. I would say that previously, our focus was on displaying the information on the screen.

Neil Weatherall: But as Dave just said, you know, as we move forward, we're wanting to provide more ways of creating and starting a workflow from the data that you see on screen. So the new web app now allows much more flexible and easy access to. Something as simple as adding a button to a particular column, we can easily configure what that button looks like, where it appears, color it is, whether it has an icon, whether it has any labels, and then we can configure through extra work we've done in the back end, what that button actually does.

Neil Weatherall: So to me, the main benefit is that becomes much easier and quicker, and it's something that we can do in config rather than in code. Which means it typically falls within the realms of sort of my team, or perhaps our power users, our customers that they can, they can bring this in and get it implemented very quickly as well as I'd say one of the biggest benefits for me is the amount of control that I have over what it looks like and what it says has also been very powerful, I think.

Neil Weatherall: Whenever you talk to anybody about deploying new apps onto someone's desktop, there's the dreaded screen real estate phrase, and that applies not only to the window that you're looking at. It also applies to what you've got within the window. So if I can make a button that has a screen. Copy icon.

Neil Weatherall: Everyone knows what that means, and I'm actually saving quite a lot of space by not having to write on the button that it copies. It copies something. So down to a granular level of such as that. It's really helping provide a better sort of experience and look and feel. And it just makes things easier when we're trying to arrange items on someone's screen that we have this flexibility

Andrew Capewell: in terms of you say how quickly I mean, have you got a reference on how quickly you've been able to implement a feature that someone's asked for?

Neil Weatherall: I think in terms of the web app work itself you know you're talking minutes here. rather than anything else. Seconds if we, if we're quick, minutes if not. But yeah, it's, it's much quicker to implement. The other side of my role around sort of sales, prototyping has become much quicker as well.

Andrew Capewell: And so you're able to take an idea and just prototype it, show it to the customer and get it deployed to them.

Andrew Capewell: Really quickly, whereas, you know,

Neil Weatherall: agreed. Yeah, I think that we've always been very quick and we're always we can pick up on what they want and we can create something and present something. I would say that the new web app is a lot is meaning that the presentation of the data within the web app is now on a similar level to.

Neil Weatherall: What we're providing behind the scenes, that's more and more in parity and often what you see on the screen is the thing that catches your eye first, rather than the clever stuff that's going on in the background. So the fact that it can provide a more curated streamlined experience on the screen, I think also bodes well for what people might expect to be happening in the back end, the bit that they can't see.

Andrew Capewell: That's really cool. So on to David, I've got a question around innovative features. Can you think of an example of a really innovative feature that gets you excited, that sets this application or front end apart from anything else you've seen?

David Jones: I think it's, I mean, I'm going to echo quite a lot of what Neil has just said about really, but essentially what we've built is a.

David Jones: a framework that allows us to implement a kind of an arbitrary workflow within our platform without having to do any sort of any actual custom coding. It's all possible to, it's possible to build a workflow application that is has got its own kind of branded look and feel, white labels for the, for the customer.

David Jones: It has. its own layout of different screens and grids within the application framework. You can design your own forms that can be used to enter data or manipulate data on the screen and you can hook it up to the workflow backend. And again, that's all through configuration rather than rather than having to do development yourself.

David Jones: So this is something that we, you know, we manage internally at the moment. What I'm looking for in the kind of next phase is actually giving our end users the ability to build this themselves. So that's kind of starting to add features to the platform that allow people to configure this themselves.

David Jones: And I think that's going to really make us sort of, sort of revolutionize the way that we deliver, to deliver solutions to customers.

Andrew Capewell: Yeah, that's really interesting. So talk to me a little bit about why you think configuration and configurability in the app is a really fundamentally important feature.

David Jones: It's all around time to market. And it's, it's around sort of being able to support a broad range of workflows for our customers. We deal with some very big organizations within the, within, within the financial markets they, they have workflows that are very similar to each other, but there's always some sort of nuances in terms of the ways that they.

David Jones: Interact with their counterparties, the way that they manage the data, the way they want to look at the data and have it presented, and so we have to provide a high degree of configurability to the platform. Look, we are still a startup or a scale up. We have a small development team. What we want to do is build a set of tools that allow us to service this kind of market without having to do a lot of custom coding, a lot of custom development.

David Jones: So that was the, the reason that was the foundation of, of building a web service and a web app that we can configure to apply to different workflows when our customers want them. That's

Andrew Capewell: really interesting. And Neil, I think we've, we've developed this web app with customers in mind and using a customer centric design system.

Andrew Capewell: I wonder if you were able to share where a customer suggestion directly influenced a feature that we built.

Neil Weatherall: Yeah, there's been a really good example recently whereby our, our sort of initial delivery covered everything. That we'd planned and that the client was happy with, as they started using, you know, the web app and the workflow, they realized that there were some tasks that they were performing all the time that hadn't been covered because they weren't necessarily a large part of, they weren't a big task that they did that felt quite important, but it's just something that they did multiple times a day.

Neil Weatherall: Where it came to was they didn't need an all singing and all dancing solution that we might spend a while designing, they just needed something that could work quite quickly. So in this example it was they wanted to click something which launched a pop up which showed them some information, didn't necessarily need to be pretty or have lots of options in it, it was more that it just needed to show some data.

Neil Weatherall: We'd previously had something in there. In the old web app that did this and it reminded us that we should bring it into this. So this is able to be this is able to be delivered by a config and it can be again sort of can be added in a matter of minutes and it means that. We can deliver and prototype and show, you know, it could be.

Neil Weatherall: I just want to click this and see this. It just needs to pop up. It just, you know, it doesn't have to be color coded or have logos. Can you just do this? And I'd like that to appear differently on different screens. And I guess it came away from the idea of the new web app is. Much more consistent in branding and how we thought about design.

Neil Weatherall: I think we possibly looked away from the fact that you can still have some quite simple elements in it and they just fit because they're functional and they do what they need to and they're efficient. And so we needed to bring that back in from the old web app because, you know, not everything needs to be designed.

Neil Weatherall: You know, it's designed through to the maximum. Sometimes you just need something that's efficient and works. And yeah, we needed to pull that back in. And

David Jones: because that kind of thing is because that kind of thing is configurable rather than you having to code to it, it's something you can iterate on with the customer.

David Jones: So you can actually sit on a call and make changes to the components that you're building through for them in real time. And so you can get instant feedback from them. So you know you're delivering, you know, the solution that they want. It's

Neil Weatherall: also, it's also very useful if you can do that, the, the live aspect of changing something in the back end, you know, in the config that appears on their screen whilst you're sat on a call.

Neil Weatherall: One, it's impressive, and hopefully they like that. Two, It's just a much more responsive conversation, and it means that you can try out different ideas and more things come through to you. So, for example, I was looking at something representing bids and offers, and we changed the bids to left align and the offers to right align.

Neil Weatherall: And that made, it just made the screen come alive a bit. It was obvious what you were looking at, and it meant that we could actually get rid of a lot of other factors around color coding, conditional formatting, that made it not quite work, and we didn't quite learn the look of it, but left and right align actually gave us enough information on the screen to know what we were looking at.

Neil Weatherall: And if we'd have tried to do that over email or design the form, we could have had three or four rewrites over the course of a week or two, whereas actually we were able to do it on a 20 minute call, and I think we're all pretty happy with the result. And now we've obviously taken that away and are thinking about it in in other use cases, where can we do something like that that just presents the data better and simpler.

Andrew Capewell: And so that white that that that ability to customize it on a per customer basis really allows us to be super client centric and allow us to change things based on the needs of each client and each deployment and be able to iterate on that so that they get the right product at the right time to be able to push out to their clients as well.

Andrew Capewell: It is.

Neil Weatherall: I would say that no matter how well designed or rigorous your sort of pre sales planning process is, there will always be a level of feedback that only comes when people are using it, either in UAT or broad. And if you're wedded to a system that takes a long time to rejig, reconfigure, then that, That part of the process goes on for longer, which is just less efficient in terms of a lot of different categories, resources, time, money, and delivery dates.

Neil Weatherall: So, yeah, it's, it's good that we can do that.

Andrew Capewell: And then I suppose one of the main core features of ipushpull from the beginning has been the facility to white label. The technologies that we have so that they can be pushed out to clients being remaining within our customers branding experience. If a customer prioritizes that branding, they can make it look and feel like part of their own application or their own work.

Andrew Capewell: And have you, David, I suppose, have you seen much success with doing that? Have we seen customers demand that?

David Jones: Yes. Every customer wants to have an application that matches their branding. So that was one of the core. On the core design principles that we, you know, that we baked in from the start was making white labeling very flexible, very simple.

David Jones: So when a customer wants to, wants to white label the platform, we can offer them, you know, a theme that matches their color scheme. And once they've chosen that. Then that will create a color scheme of, you know, various different shades of the colors within their branding palette so, and we could apply their logos and logo types to the application.

David Jones: So effectively, when they're presenting Eyepush Pool to their customers. Then, you know, it looks like a native application that belongs to our, you know, that's been built by them, you know, by an in house team. It's also very simple for us. We've built this white labeling into our our CI CD pipelines.

David Jones: So, effectively, as soon as we. commit a new version of the application the white label will get applied to it, and it can be deployed to the customer's UAT or to their production environment. So it's been basically built in from the start to meet the customer's requirements in terms of the way they want it to appear, but also be very slick in the way that we can deploy it.

David Jones: So there's no kind of sort of delay in terms of deploying it for a customer. It's all built into our pipelines.

Neil Weatherall: If I could also add, I think. When we typically ask for white labeling guidance, what comes back is a sort of brand guide, a brand file, which isn't necessarily a web app branding guide, but we have a streamlined process for how we take that and turn it into something that we can use for the web app.

Neil Weatherall: Often that. That process is sort of outside of what might be available to someone on a desk, broking desk or a sales desk or a trading desk. They won't know how to do that. So the fact that we can take some information and turn it into a, a color scheme and also one that's been tested, you know, it's accessible.

Neil Weatherall: It has the right levels of contrast. The amount of hours I used to spend trying to find the right colors that would work on, Light and dark backgrounds would work for people with color blindness, et cetera, et cetera. But that's sort of now all comes out the box. So it's just one thing that hopefully either people don't have to worry about up front or they may never have considered it.

Neil Weatherall: But hopefully we'll avoid it ever being an issue in the future because we've built in that testing and resilience at the start.

Andrew Capewell: That's really cool to hear. Always cool to hear where we can reduce that and make that more streamlined for our customers without creating additional effort in elsewhere. I suppose to, to, to finish off, we've just got a bit of a co a couple of questions on the future of the app, and I suppose, Neil, the first question that springs to mind is, what are you most excited about being able to do for a customer in the next six to 12 months?

Andrew Capewell: So,

Neil Weatherall: from my point of view, one of the, one of the most exciting things, I guess, has been how we've used some sort of industry standard best of breed components. So, AG grid, for example, not that I knew much about it before, but it would appear it's widely used and it has some very cool, exciting features in it when I look at what you can do within it.

Neil Weatherall: I think that's important for several reasons. I think that If we can provide something that has a similar look and feel and capability, then people using our tools already know how to use them. The web app might seem familiar, and therefore it's less of a move away from what they've been using before.

Neil Weatherall: Adoption might be higher if people are trying to get people to move. It means that it should be easier to use. They already know what kind of features are in there, how they can use it, how it's going to work. I also think that because we deal with a variety of different clients in different types of markets, having the wealth of sort of AG grid features or the the software that we use for our workspaces, it means that we're going to be really flexible across a number of.

Neil Weatherall: different use cases. We are not just providing trading screens. We're also providing user, user sort of workflows, whether doing some sort of approval process. We're doing stuff around trade capture. We're doing stuff around reconciliations. So not all these screens need to look the same. So the fact that we've got Wealth of tools that we can use in order to make the best possible experience and then you've got really cool things like spark lines and little bars that go up and down that just add a little bit of panache to what we already offer

Andrew Capewell: fantastic.

Andrew Capewell: I love a bit of panache and then finally, the final question today just is around. What are you most excited about? In the next, in 2025 that we can do with the web app that you wouldn't have even been able to dream about maybe four years ago.

David Jones: Well, what a good question. I don't know where to start. I think as we start adding more and more sort of analysis features and the ability to pull metrics out of our, out of our web service, we're going to need far more exciting ways to to display this data through the front end.

David Jones: So one of the most requested features in the platform has been the ability to do charting and I think adding charting and the ability for users to interact with those charts and slice and dice their data and perform really a deep analysis on the data that they share using our platform and also understand the workflows and how their clients are using the platform and interacting with the workflows and presenting that in a really intuitive graphical way.

David Jones: I think that's going to be really important and it's going to really revolutionize the way that we, that our customers are using us.

Andrew Capewell: All right, thank you very much and thank you both to David and Neil for their time. You've been listening to ipushpull's podcast on our exciting new web app and we'll see you for another episode very soon.

Andrew Capewell: Bye bye.