As the company celebrates its first 50 years as a financial technology pioneer in communications and connectivity technologies, IPC has a strong focus on the application of new cloud, data and digital technologies to enhance commerce communications and connectivity.
IPC Systems began its journey of innovating financial market communications technology with the launch of its first trading tower in 1973; The equivalent of a brick cell phone looks archaic today, but it was ahead of its time.
“Turret Series 1 was a huge change and a huge improvement over other voice communications tools on the market,” IPC CEO Bob Santella told Markets Media. “It was a more sophisticated voice tool with multi-channel intercom capabilities and better connectivity and audio, and it caught on in the market very quickly.”
Bob Santella, IPC Systems
With a track record of half a century of innovation in connectivity, security and flexible trading solutions, IPC has remained at the forefront of change and benefits from a client base that represents the full spectrum of financial market participants, sellers and buyers. Ancillary companies, banks and stock exchanges.
Santella highlighted two early technology innovations that IPC pioneered: the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), a late 1990s innovation for communicating over the Internet rather than over telecom networks, and voice communication via API integrations, which improved Enabled client connectivity.
“Looking back over the last decade or so, Connexus Unigy, our primary communications platform for the retail industry, has evolved from an on-premise to a cloud-based configuration,” said Santella. “This is another shift that anticipates market trends; Also, the migration from legacy analog to digital network technologies is something that IPC has done as a pioneer and advocate.”
Trading and investment firms, as well as their technology partners, were rocked by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, which suddenly and unexpectedly “decentralized” work environments from trading floors to home offices, an arrangement that lasted for the better part of 2 years. Today’s “new normal” seems to be a hybrid rule – according to an industry survey, as of May 2023, only 20% of financial services firms require a full-time in-office work schedule.
The global pandemic has forced this acceleration of innovation to address the challenges of remote working, particularly in terms of enabling institutional-level trading capabilities from guest rooms, while ensuring businesses remain compliant with all regulations, particularly those related to communications surveillance and trade surveillance .
“It’s not about hardware anymore. “Customers want software-first solutions that enable any communication device such as phones, tablets and PCs to support secure and compliant access to trading environments,” said Santella. “IPC makes this possible today, supporting compliant remote trading from any location. Our ongoing development of next-generation cloud-based solutions will continue to enhance this offering.
Another ongoing challenge for market participants – from the largest financial institutions to small wealth managers – is the effective collection and management of real-time, low-latency data streams. Technology providers need to be able to enable such data delivery across an ever-expanding range of markets, including digital assets.
“All tradable assets require some kind of market data capability,” Santella said. “Emerging asset classes may require different delivery channels than we see for more mature asset classes. In any case, ensuring that we can respond quickly to changing market demands is a key issue for all of our customers.”
Going forward, IPC will continue to prioritize the development of connectivity and communication tools and technologies to make commerce more efficient and streamline compliance operations to the benefit of its ever-growing customer base.
“In the past, we have focused on the sell-side institutional trading market, and now we are enjoying great success in expanding our addressable market into adjacent industries such as buy-side firms, including wealth advisory firms and public and private pension funds,” Santella said . “We will continue to invest in digital technologies and solutions and delve deeply into other emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and natural language processing. We are very excited to see what the next 50 years of technological development will bring.”
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