IPC Systems delivers cutting-edge tool for high-stakes trading

IPC’s Vice President for Asia-Pacific Sales, Bruce Maslen, shares why Unigy is the leading platform for customers and partners.

IPC Systems recently won at Singapore Business Review’s Technology Excellence Awards for its remarkable platform that has become popular amongst the trading industry and all market participants—Unigy.

As a leading provider of solutions for the financial markets community, IPC Systems works with the premise of delivering efficient communications. With traders no longer working in isolation, Unigy facilitates instantaneous and efficient communication between trading floors and boutique investment managers.

Bruce Maslen, Vice President of Sales for APAC, says no one should settle for last-generation technology, especially when the stakes are high. IPC systems are focused on increasing the efficiency and productivity of the trading environment through a unified communications platform.

Following the award ceremony, Singapore Business Review and Bruce discussed the nuances and complexities of the trading environment, why Unigy is the right platform for sell-side players, and how the company is delivering BCP solutions for its customers amidst a pandemic.

Can you tell us about your winning project—Unigy?

Absolutely. Unigy is a game-changing, state-of-the-art, SOA-based platform for trading communications and applications. Unigy is flexible, yet secure, and robust, yet simple—essentially, a platform that changes everything. This is in fact the second consecutive year our Unigy system has won the SBR Technology Excellence Award for Infrastructure Technology.

In more detail, Unigy features one of the buy-side and sell-side’s largest, most diverse and cutting-edge portfolios of trading applications and solutions, all of which are accessible across the entire trading workflow for the greatest collaboration benefits. Unigy is deeply integrated into the workflows of trading firms and market participants of every size and market segment globally—from the largest trading floors to boutique investment managers—securely connecting them to counterparties. Enabling internal and external collaboration for safer, compliant interactions that drive revenue and profits.

Unigy is also a comprehensive platform for recording, surveillance and proactive monitoring services. We expedite more compliance voice recording channels than any other company in the industry, with more than 80,000 recording channels deployed and supported worldwide. Unigy is a single point of contact for our customers’ entire call recording infrastructure.

Built on industry open standards and our API-first strategy to serve customers in the industry, Unigy enables a compelling ROI allowing IPC’s customers to drive productivity whilst also managing operational complexity. Unigy’s simplified design and high availability structure is distinct from generic enterprise productivity stacks through combining an effective and adaptable software-based delivery model with BCP options that scale up and down. This meets corporate policy and risk tolerance needs, whilst at the same time reducing total cost of ownership.

What inspired your team to arrive at this innovative concept?

The main inspiration behind Unigy is efficient communications: do everything faster and better for your clients. When the stakes are high, why settle for last-generation technology to handle trading workflow?

Most importantly, Unigy meets the needs of today’s volatile trading environment, where customers are constantly faced with more regulation, increasingly complex deals and higher competitive pressures than ever before. Regulations, such as MiFID and MiFID II, are fueling an unprecedented need to separate relevant information from vast data pools. With traders no longer working in isolation, they need to interact instantly and efficiently with multiple people across a variety of environments.

Designed specifically to streamline the trade lifecycle whilst making users more productive, compliant and efficient, Unigy uses the latest standards-based technology and a SOA-based architecture to help our customers drive flexibility and scalability. Our new turrets, devices and applications, collaboration tools and productivity applications are all built on the Unigy platform and deliver powerful, robust capabilities to your entire organization.

What makes your project a cut above the competition?

More than 110,000 of the world’s traders currently use Unigy, and in terms of placing the platform above our competition that is something that speaks for itself. Industry leading and widely adopted, Unigy is secure, compliant, with an end-to-end solution, and purpose-built to address the specific needs of the global regulated financial markets community. Unigy seamlessly interoperates with IPC’s network community of over 6,600 customer locations in 750 cities throughout the world, and benefits from IPC’s other product areas.

Tell us about your future plans. What other innovations are you looking to launch for consumers in the near term?

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has shown the need to be able to use hybrid cloud trading solutions quickly, efficiently and seamlessly. IPC sees a future in hybrid cloud solutions that can help balance concerns around security and privacy with access, where appropriate, to the resources of the full public cloud. This can also serve as a staging or bridging solution as a firm moves towards full public cloud adoption, enabling legacy applications to be maintained alongside cloud deployments. IPC sees the future as accelerating customer cloud adoption, giving the ability to seamlessly have traders work from anywhere, without loss of performance and most importantly with complete business assurance.
Through our Communications and Network services, we have brought to the market a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution designed to address the specific needs of regulated financial market users. SaaS delivers the advantages of our Unigy platform for unified communications and applications coupled with the simplicity and scalability of a cloud-based solution. Unigy is the essential communications solution that can provide secure and reliable connections to established counterparties and the IPC financial markets community.

How are you redesigning your operations amidst a health and economic crisis? Is it business as usual or unusual? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

• Some companies continue to separate teams across floors and or alternate facilities.
• Some companies institute some form of social distancing on the trade floors.
• Some companies re-engineer trader work spaces with health/safety in mind.
• Some companies continue some form of A/B rotation.

It is important to note that IPC remains focused on empowering all financial market participants to maintain business continuity by enabling traders and other regulated users to work remotely during these challenging times. We are dedicated to supporting our customers’ business continuity and disaster recovery plans through a variety of our products and services such as IQ/MAX® Omni, Remote Devices, EVS as a Service and Disaster Recovery as a Service.

What does it mean for you to win in the SBR Technology Excellence Awards 2020?

We are honored that, year after year, our Unigy platform is recognized by industry leaders, customers and partners. As the industry continues to evolve, we are continually designing new solutions and developing our offerings to meet the evolving needs of financial organizations. Unigy is a prime example of our focus on making the trading environment more efficient and productive through a unified communications platform.