Sell-Side Technology Awards 2017: Best Sell-Side Trading Network—IPC Systems

Jersey City-based IPC Systems confirmed its place at the head of this field by winning the best trading network category in this year’s Sell-Side Technology Awards, thanks to its Financial Markets Network (FMN) suite. It is the firm’s second win in four years in a category it reclaims from BT Networks, winner of the 2015 and 2016 award, while SunGard emerged victorious in 2014. 

The FMN has 6,000 live sites in 60 countries, and in 2016, IPC added over 250 new clients, ranging from brokers and investment banks to regional banks, buy-side firms, liquidity venues and trade lifecycle service providers.

This global approach is what IPC considers to be one of its most distinctive advantages. “Because we have that unique network that is very diverse in its nature, we can help market participants source liquidity, generate alpha and mitigate risk,” says Ganesh Iyer, director of global product marketing at IPC. 

Currently, the FMN suite provides data services exclusively to capital markets participants. It includes a financial extranet, managed Ethernet, a virtual private network (VPN) and trader voice services with unified access. The suite is protocol-agnostic and supports FIX messages, transaction standards, unicast/multicast market data as well as other industry protocols. 

IPC’s goal is to update and enhance its network with new services and solutions every year, which will prove compelling to its client base. In May last year, the FMN was enhanced with the addition of two new services, the FX Hub, a low-latency, co-located performance solution, and the Fixed Income Marketplace, designed to allow users to trade fixed-income instruments electronically or via voice. Both were developed to address the challenges facing capital markets traders around the lack of information and transparency pertaining to reliable liquidity. According to Iyer, the solutions “create” liquidity by enabling all-to-all trading, dealer-to-dealer trading and dealer-to-client trading.

The Connexus Cloud was also launched in June 2016 as an encrypted communication platform allowing 200,000 members to interact securely, exchange information, and mitigate risk. The platform also offers partner services for integrated biometric, encryption and distributed-ledger technologies. But perhaps IPC’s biggest coup came by way of its Connexus Infrastructure Service launch, a managed, private and hybrid infrastructure platform available at premier co-location facilities, globally.