IPC and GreenKey Technologies’ Blotter App won Best in AI in the 2020 Markets Choice Awards.

Markets Media caught up with David Brown, Chief Operating Officer at IPC, to learn more.

What is your reaction to the Blotter App winning Best in AI in the 2020 Markets Choice Awards?

I was delighted when Blotter won ‘Best in AI’ in the 2020 Markets Choice Awards given the strong competition this year from some of our industry’s most respected firms. Both IPC and GreenKey were thrilled to be recognized for the transformative and seamless efficiencies we are jointly bringing to traders everywhere in the world. I was also deeply grateful to all the market participants who voted for us, as well as distinguished industry leaders and the MCA Advisory Board for this prestigious award. Importantly, this award was a tribute to the pioneering work around artificial intelligence that the IPC and GreenKey teams have been engaged in.

Please describe what Blotter App is all about — what are the primary capabilities and how does it differentiate?

Blotter is an innovative and pioneering data visualization tool that IPC and GreenKey Technologies have jointly designed. The solution has broken new ground in trade execution, surveillance and compliance. Blotter leverages natural language processing, machine learning and speech recognition technologies to enable financial market participants to convert their over-the-counter voice quotes into a structured data feed. This is a remarkable feat of engineering as trading is fast-paced, uses unique terminology, and often occurs in noisy environments.

Blotter has many important applications in the financial markets. Traders relish being able to have high-value and significant trades captured and transacted accurately by merely speaking them. This greatly accelerates their ability to capitalize on market opportunities.

For surveillance, Blotter provides new analytics capabilities by turning voice data into actionable information. As an example, through voice data it captures, Blotter can illuminate trader-customer interactions by being able to answer questions like: Which customers generate the most business? Which customers request prices but don’t trade? What percentage of price requests lead to a booked trade?

And of course, there are many instances in which Blotter has proven to be invaluable for compliance purposes. Blotter automates the entire arduous process concerning trader conversations that involved negotiations and execution, which had to be recorded and then separately transcribed for posterity.

What was the ‘story’ behind Blotter App launch, i.e. what market gap was it designed to fill?

We’ve been working with GreenKey for nearly two years after we identified them as first-movers in natural language processing, speech recognition and machine learning for the financial markets. Our initial partnership grew into a strategic investment, through which our CEO, Bob Santella, joined the GreenKey board of directors, and GreenKey founder and CEO Anthony Tassone became an advisor to IPC. Our partnership has unlocked the value in voice communications by bringing together IPC’s trading communications expertise and cloud financial ecosystem of over 6,600 diverse market participants with GreenKey’s next-generation technologies.

Blotter addresses an important market problem. Voice is the largest source of unstructured data in today’s financial markets. Once voice is digitized and structured, it yields major business benefits for our clients including simplifying and automating trader workflows and offering customer insights. Blotter has been able to fill this important gap in the market, specifically in the areas of trade execution, surveillance and compliance.

What does the future hold for Blotter App?

Artificial intelligence is one of the top technologies set to transform the future of trading. IPC has demonstrated a deep commitment to customer success by making significant investments in various fields of artificial intelligence such as machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. Blotter solves an important market problem by leveraging cutting-edge technologies to structure and digitize voice, thereby automating workflows.

That word — automation — is the key to the future of Blotter as well as our overall AI initiatives. By enabling our clients to automate repetitive tasks like populating trade tickets, they can unlock incredible efficiencies that allow them to operate faster, realize better pricing, execute trade efficiently, and much more.

We couldn’t possibly have predicted how far and quickly we would innovate in AI as we have. The industry is truly embracing this technology because of its multitudinous benefits. Blotter is just the first of many steps toward a future where we can unlock the AI’s full potential.