SST Awards 2018: Best Sell-Side Trading Communication System—IPC

In a rapidly evolving industry, which forces trading firms to be flexible, scalable, cost-efficient and compliant, IPC has continued to innovate and develop new technologies that enable its clients to communicate and collaborate more effectively. This win comes on the heels of its most recent product release, Unigy 360, a cloud-based software-as-service (SasS) platform that provides end-to-end points of communication across multiple devices and allows middle-office, back-office and other regulated users to connect with traders through a single interface. The platform enables traders to prioritize incoming calls, access specific point-to-point connections and communicate via voice, text or chat across a selection of handsets, intercoms or speaker channels.

Unigy 360 offers clients the option to scale up or down, reduce service costs on demand, access a more efficient network, offload the management requirements of the software to IPC, and ensure regulatory standards are met when archiving communications. 

“Unigy, as a platform, has been a market leader for quite a number of years, but 2017 was really the introduction of 360 and the ability for clients to receive trader voice in a cloud model—that was a big milestone,” says Bruce Bolcer, senior director of product management at IPC. “So it is now available as software-as-a-service, allowing clients to flex up and down as needed.”

Data security, including communications data, is one of the industry’s leading concerns. Unigy 360 is delivered over a private cloud-based infrastructure where information is transferred from the firm’s personal datacenters to client premises. As it doesn’t operate across the public internet, this network provides a safer and more efficient communication environment, less susceptible to latency problems or security issues. 

IPC has set its sights on building on the success of the platform by developing a more seamless transition from the original Unigy model to the updated 360 version, and by providing a wider variety of price offerings to individual client needs. “We are looking at investing in rounding out the 360 offering with a wider range of end-user flexibility with different levels of sophistication and different price points depending on what the end-user requires,” says Bolcer.