Sell-Side Technology Awards 2020: Best Sell-Side Technology Provider—IPC Systems

By winning the best sell-side technology provider category in these awards, IPC Systems has finally followed up its phenomenal run of form in the annual Waters Rankings where it has won the best trading floor communications system provider category for 14 straight years. This year, the Jersey City-based infrastructure and communications specialist featured prominently in the best infrastructure provider and best sell-side trading network categories without emerging victorious in either, although it did win the best sell-side trading communication system award, which it also won back in 2018. The bulk of IPC’s awards success has come on the back of its Unigy platform, a unified communication and application offering, although it has also enjoyed considerable success with its Connexus family of products. 

It goes without saying that all technology and service providers have had to deal with the recent uncertainty, stressed systems and delivering solutions through a range of mediums to a widely dispersed user community, while at the same time managing their own employees’ needs, especially in the early days of Covid-19 pandemic. According to Dave Brown, COO of IPC, his firm was able to maintain the breadth and depth of its products and their functionality, even during the period of rapid change in February and March this year. “Covid-19 was very different from anything the industry had ever experienced and was completely asynchronous,” he says. “Traditionally, in a disaster scenario, people would go to their business continuity planning (BCP) sites, which is the standard operating model for large financial institutions. However, as we all know, this crisis happened everywhere and simultaneously. We are a global organization with staff offices and customers in all the major financial centers, which meant that we had to deal with this exceptional event on a real-time basis.” 

Brown explains that IPC was able to maintain its “integrity” at clients’ primary locations, because, he says, clients typically employed a multi-tasking approach to dealing with the crisis—they had workers who remained at their usual locations, but they also had employees who went to BCP sites, while the majority worked from home. “That’s the first time we’ve ever seen that done at such scale within the industry and I’m pleased to say that both Unigy and IPC coped with it successfully,” he says. 

By winning the final category of this year’s SST Awards, IPC joins former winners SunGard (2013), Markit (2014), Bloomberg (2015), SmartStream (2016), IHS Markit (2017), SIX (2018) and Numerix (2019) as a recipient of this award.