Waters Rankings 2020: Best Trading Floor Communication System Provider—IPC Systems

For an astounding 15^th consecutive year, IPC Systems takes home the best trading floor communication system provider award at the Waters Rankings thanks to its Unigy platform. IPC’s domination of this category has not wavered even with Covid-19 pandemic reshaping the trading landscape.

“The impact of the coronavirus is unavoidable,” says David Brown, IPC’s COO. “Over the last six months, it has of course dominated the headlines, and completely changed companies’ priorities to a large extent.” Not dissimilar to a lot of firms, IPC was forced to mobilize its entire workforce to work from home, having never trialed remote working at this scale before. “It was very much the same with our clients as well. We saw it go from thinking about it, to [acting on] it within a very short time frame and that happened simultaneously and globally,” he says.

In the last year, IPC pulled together its two flagship offerings—the Unigy trading floor communications system and the Connexus Cloud cloud infrastructure—to create Connexus Unigy. This is the first time the company has combined the two business lines into a single product offering. “We’ve added a lot of features to shift to more of a subscription-based business model, as well as better enabling third-party integrations,” Brown says.

For the last few years, IPC has spent a lot of time creating clear audio capabilities for the platform. Brown predicts a “voice renaissance” in the coming years, spurred by the pandemic, as he says he saw a huge shift back toward voice trading through the extreme periods of market volatility in March.

“Creating clear audio capabilities is the holy grail for us in a lot of ways in unlocking the capability of the platform. It’s been a multi-year effort, but we really advanced it over the last 12 months,” he says.