Steve Grob: Hi, I'm Steve Grob. I'm the founder of Vision57, a capital markets technology consulting firm. Thanks for tuning in. And today we're talking about a really interesting combination or collaboration between Rapid Edition and I Push Pull. The reason that it really got on my radar was because it seemed to resonate with so many of the problems that our industry is grappling with at the minute.

Steve Grob: And, you know, the, the, the center villain in the piece as always is data. And how do you get it In the right format, the right way at the right place at the right time. And as data continues to explode in our industry, that's going to become a bigger and bigger problem. And so this struck me as some really fresh thinking about how to solve A problem that our industry has had almost since its inception.

Steve Grob: Before we get into the sort of juicy bits, let me just ask you guys to introduce yourselves, perhaps Dan, starting with you.

Dan Eccleston: Sure. Hi all. Thanks, Steve. Yeah, my name is Dan Eccleston. I'm co-founder of ipushpull. We're an omnichannel data sharing and workflow platform. So that means we enable customers to send and receive data over many different platforms, including many chat platforms.

Dan Eccleston: We standardize those messages and then uniquely we're able to give our customers ability to build workflows on top of that data as well. So that's it in a nutshell.

Mike Powell: And Mike. Yeah. Hi, everyone. Mike Powell. I'm the CEO at Rapid Edition, and we're a trading technology specialist company. So we provide software platform and hardware acceleration to really simplify and accelerate the deployment of customer defined trading workflow in their IP.

Steve Grob: Let's just start with how did you guys, did you guys know each other before you started working on this? Or how did you, you know, how did you. In which bar did you meet, as it were, in terms of how you came to get together?

Mike Powell: Well, I'll take that one. I think so I met Matt Chung, who's the CEO, I push pull and Dan's colleague actually through a mutual client who was kind of working with both of our technologies.

Mike Powell: And that was actually probably the kind of spark of the conversation between our two firms. And I think as, as we got to know, get to know each other more and about what, what we do, we saw this sort of quite a natural synergy kind of emerging between the two technologies. And we, and we thought of, you know, there could be.

Mike Powell: Could be a good collaboration here. And that was also encouraged by the mutual client as well. And what you've got

Steve Grob: is one of the core products you have is, is our a monitor, which is sitting there just understanding everything that's going on. And I think the idea was then to see how ipushpull could wrap itself around that and add some extra value.

Steve Grob: Was that roughly the idea?

Mike Powell: Yeah, that's right, Steve. So, I mean, if you look at what Rapid Edition does, you know, we build core electronic trading infrastructure and build workflow on top of that. So, obviously, you've got, you know, orders, Trays, executions, confirmations, flying across that platform, a whole set of like key key data and information.

Mike Powell: And part of that offering is a real time monitoring platform that sits alongside the underlying hub which allows you to see all of that data in real time through a web UI, which you can define to see aggregate levels of, of, you know, where in real time, where your orders are, where your trades are, whether you're getting rejects and so on.

Mike Powell: And then also layer on top of that. Various things like risk limits other notifications and so on so really Some important information for for traders and trading support teams And that, that effectively comes up in, in a web UI based on the user's you know, PC monitor. And, and I think the discussion with, with, with ipushpull is what more could we do with that data?

Mike Powell: How could we make it more, more usable, get it to the right people, quicker, better format, more succinctly? So that was really the genesis of the the conversation.

Steve Grob: And, and so what, if you were to pick the story up, Dan, from that, what was it that you thought or your colleagues felt would enable you to solve a bigger problem for by working with Rapid Edition?

Dan Eccleston: It was, it was a bit of a no brainer for us because it's a well defined problem and well defined kind of road road map in terms of a system we'd already delivered. So the, the, the opportunity was there that really Mike was hoping to use other ways of getting information out in front of end users.

Dan Eccleston: And that's exactly what we do. And we were already doing for the mutual customer. So quite, quite an easy one to jump on and say two and two is going to make five here. Both systems pretty well defined, no technical hurdle at all really to deal with. So, you know, that, that was the the, the, the problem itself is a common problem that we see and we solve for.

Dan Eccleston: So it wasn't anything particularly new from a generic respect, but a great opportunity to work with a, with a, with a good partner.

Steve Grob: And just, just digging into, you said this was a fairly typical business. Use case for you guys. Could you just maybe unpick that a little bit Dan and say what what is that if you can Is that a generic use case?

Dan Eccleston: It boils down to the benefits of this omni channel approach in the There's there's many systems out there that have very very useful ways of interacting with end users, right? Whether that be screens or data or apis But you know the old the old desktop real estate You know it's, it's difficult to cut into what and be relevant and be upfront on that desktop for clients all the time.

Dan Eccleston: Clients more and more, what are they doing? They're living in some core workflow tools that might be a chat platform, might be two chat platforms, emails still there in the background. Yeah. Maybe a little bit more on mobile than they used to, if they're away from the desk. Maybe living in spreadsheets as always, you know, many, many You know, operational areas and front office.

Dan Eccleston: So so what what we do in that common problem is to say, right? Well, here's some real data. You want you need to get in front of the user, but if they're not looking at the screen, they're going to miss it. And that's the danger. So how do you get it in front of them? Often? It's not one thing. It's not one.

Dan Eccleston: You know, you need you need a choice. Yeah, so that's what, that's what we offer. We offer that choice to deliver it into more and more something like Microsoft Teams, or maybe it's a little bit more WhatsApp, or maybe it's an email as well. So giving that opportunity to send out critical information and make sure the end user sees it.

Steve Grob: And it's, it's being able to see the trees in the woods almost, isn't it? It's the opposite of that, of just getting the one tree I'm interested in. Delivered to me at the right point in time. Exactly. And it's,

Dan Eccleston: it's, it's the high profile nudge to say, you need to go and look at your rapid edition screen because it's up there, but you hadn't noticed because you were dealing with something else at that

Steve Grob: time.

Steve Grob: One of the other things I was sort of wondering about as a question for both of you guys is, you know, when people talk about alerts and everything, obviously they're risk alerts. Oh my gosh, something's blown up, is going to blow up, has blown up, what have you. But it strikes me that this sort of technology could be used in a sort of positive way, if you like, to pinpoint and send data that could make me as a trader to a better job for my client, either because I can ring him up and thank him for an order that's just come in or to monitor.

Steve Grob: Are you thinking in those sorts of lines yourselves or, or how do you, how do you see the other side of the coin, I guess.

Mike Powell: Yeah, definitely, Steve. I mean, I think like the as Dan alluded to in the initial use case, and we do think there's a lot of a broader applicability here of the two technologies, but looking at the initial use case, if you think who's using our monitor capability, it's typically traders or trading support, right?

Mike Powell: So they're obviously trying to keep on top of huge flows of you know, electronic trading is gonna be huge flows of orders or happening extremely quickly. How do you keep on on top of that data so we can generate alerts and notifications through the platform, but they'll they'll come up in the screen.

Mike Powell: And as as Dan said, you know, if you if you're multitasking, if you're away from your desk, if you're a trader and you're working an order for a client, because you're doing some high touch stuff as well, you're not focused on that. So what are those alerts? As you said, typically, it can be things like, you know, you've either got system checks or business checks.

Mike Powell: So it could be, you know, Drop session or you breached a risk limit and those, as you said, you know, they're kind of like a sort of, you know, that's been negative is sort of danger thing, but you still need to know them. Right? Super critical, right? And a lot of this is about productivity. And allowing you to super serve your clients and be really responsive to to to your clients needs But actually can go a lot further than that because effectively You can we can push up any data that's flowing across the platform plus kind of bespoke calculations and things that the the So it could be you know, i'm a trader And a large orders come in, so it hasn't breached the limit, but it's a strategic client and they've just placed a large order.

Mike Powell: You might want to know about that. You want to keep an eye on the execution. It's a key client for you. You want to get one of your, your, your traders focused on, on managing that, that order, it could be that you've got an algo that sets some price and volume limits and as some of those child orders are starting to get executed.

Mike Powell: While you haven't yet breached, breached the limit that you're kind of touching those thresholds, right? And Brady, you're thinking that there's danger. This doesn't get executed. So actually I'm going to call the client up and say, well, Can we look at this in a different way? You know, can we maybe push some to our dark pool or one of my high touch guy to help you execute?

Mike Powell: This is a bit this important thing. So I think it's all about responsiveness being more efficient securing Execution is all it's all around productivity and just making sure that I'm not, you know, everybody multitasks, you know, no one's sitting there watching, you know, thousands of updates a minute flashing away in front of them and being to keep on top of that data.

Mike Powell: So hence the notifications and alert stuff that we can we can generate, but making sure that that hits the target. The primary chat communication channels and they don't miss it is a really big deal.

Steve Grob: I guess given the changes in the human dimension of our workforce, you know, we've, I read somewhere the other day that 40 percent of decisions made in our industry now taken by millennials.

Steve Grob: They, their expectations of what they're expecting technology to do for them is, I, it would seem to me is going to make these types of systems massively kind of almost table stakes for businesses that want to operate today and in the future. I just wonder what, whether you guys, what thoughts you guys had on that and related to that, the importance or role or otherwise of standards in all of this.

Dan Eccleston: I can answer the first bit. I think that, yeah, there is an increasing demand to make. Technology work harder because the younger generation know, know the possibilities. They know the art of the possible with it and are used to configuring technology to help them in all sorts of ways. Right? So you bring that into the workplace, you need high configurability, fairly easy to use technology.

Dan Eccleston: So that's, that's a really important part of where I pushball came from and what we're, we're trying to be is, is to Almost make the technology itself be proactive so that the, you know, the person on the desk, the end user can actually be much more efficient by effectively being more reactive. So, you know, I've got, I've got these assistants all over the place that pre configured to help them out and let them know something's going on.

Dan Eccleston: So, you know, as a trader or a broker, that can save a huge amount of time and, you know, increase your efficiency, but massively improve your client service right, right back to the use case might. Mentioned earlier where a big order comes in, but you know, you missed it, right, missed the trade opportunity because you weren't looking at the screen at the right time, you know, make sure it gets to the right place with the right message.

Dan Eccleston: And suddenly, you know, that that opportunities back in place. So, so I think from definitely from a demand perspective and the way the landscape is changing. Using technology in that way is going to be huge and just get huge and we're, you know, we're not going to touch on AI much in this conversation, but, you know, you can see that starting to add to that level of benefit that people are going to be expecting from technology in the next few years.

Dan Eccleston: I got a

Steve Grob: great message the other day from someone. On that it said, I want my AI to do the washing and cooking for me so I can do writing, you know, pictures and the creative stuff. And that's that's that's kind of the thing, isn't it? But so I might just quick on the standards thing. I mean, you know, rapid has been at the forefront, not just a fix and others.

Steve Grob: So they're clearly important for you. So where does that fit in this? Sort of multi vendor, contemporary, millennial set up.

Mike Powell: You know, ultimately it comes down to how seamlessly you can, you know, you can automate these processes, right? And I mean, yes, there's standards in financial services, but there's lots of them, right?

Mike Powell: So, as you said, even FIX there's multiple versions of FIX in use, a sort of kind of custom messages around that. But, you know, there's, there's, there's other, you know, multiple other protocols. You've got. Sort of, you know, native exchange, binary protocols, SBE, Kafka, you name it, right? Both platforms are effectively API driven, open protocol platforms.

Mike Powell: So what that means is we can consume pretty much any data in any format and then normalize that into the user's format of choice. And then kind of working between the two platforms and also distribute that on the channel of choice. So, you know, I guess we like to think we're a bit more modern technology.

Mike Powell: We're lucky. You know, some of the older big monolithic technologies up there were great in the day, but the technology wasn't available. Then we're built on more modern standards that with kind of interoperability and integration effectively at the heart of everything we do. And that's what's helping solve these challenges because of you.

Mike Powell: It started the call with the data comes in many formats. It's one of the big issues you touched on either. If you want to really work, it has to be trained on great data. Bringing that data together in the right format. So you can mine it, you can, you know, you can apply machine learning to that data is, is, you know, is fundamental to, to where, where we need to get to.

Mike Powell: So, you know, I think effectively what we're doing is, yes, there are standards, but we can bring multiple standards together with the help of I push, pull. You know, a lot of stuff that we do is very around, very structured data. But I push Paul can bring unstructured data into that conversation so they can enrich those messages that are going out to their own client.

Mike Powell: And hence why it comes back to the point, you know, we, we think it's a very natural extension of what we're doing and a very natural partnership because it's all around dealing with huge amounts of information and then picking the really critical bits of that information and enhancing them and getting it to the right person at the right time.

Mike Powell: And

Steve Grob: I think, I think, I mean, that's probably quite a good note. To end on, because that, that sums up exactly why I, I think this is such an exciting combination and I know we'll be reading a bit more about some other implementations that you're, you're both doing, I guess, sometime in the summer, if we ever have one that is, and, you know, we should definitely catch up again, talk through where we think some of this stuff's going, but in the meantime, Dan and Mike, thank you very much for your time.

Steve Grob: Thanks. Thanks.