IPC Systems long has had about 50-percent market share in the financial trading desk and trading communications businesses, says Jonathan Morton, IPC VP, product marketing. Its new “Unigy” platform, using a software approach rather than a hardware approach, will enable others in the trading ecosystem, suchy as research analysts, portfolio managers, compliance personnel and economists, access to the same communications tools used by traders.
The new platform should also make possible adoption of IPC systems by smaller companies as well, as Unigy is a software-based system that eliminates 80 percent of hardware. Unigy also integrates formerly-disparate systems whether on-floor or off-floor, in a way that reduces support and maintenance, says Mark Miller, IPC Systems VP.
Unigy is “more affordable for smaller and medium businesses that couldn’t afford it before,” says Miller. Smaller hedge funds that formerly could not justify an IPC system now can, he says.
At the same time, the Session Initation Protocol platform also means users can develop mew applications. Among the new apps already available is a way to make calls in less than two seconds, an important feature for traders that always make lots of short calls.
Unigy also supports the intercom functions traders use to communicate with associates and partners off the trading floor. An “off-hours” app sits on an iPhone and allows traders on commute home to look at orders and communication history and build a call list for the next morning, says Miller.
A “call sentiment analysis” app translates voice into text in real time, and uses key word spotting to identify bearish or bullish sentiment that could identify broader bearish or bullish sentiments across a trader’s directory.
A “market communications visualization” feature illustrates who, at each desk, is being talked to, and who the counter party is, and the value of a call, at that time, says Miller. That app allows traders to learn from their own histories who they talked to, who they should have talked to and what those calls were worth.
