AFTAs 2018: Best Partnership or Alliance—IPC Systems & GreenKey Technologies

One of the secrets to a successful partnership is the ability for each side to complement the other. This is certainly the case for winners of the best partnership or alliance category in the 2018 AFTAs, IPC Systems and GreenKey Technologies, for their collaboration on an AI-based speech recognition product. 

Anthony Tassone, founder of GreenKey, notes that the two firms were originally competitors. Over the years, they started to find common ground with one another and the two management teams began to understand each other. “GreenKey began to re-position its product offering; it became less competitive with IPC and much more complementary,” says Tassone.  

Once GreenKey’s offering was repositioned to focus on speech-recognition transcription, there was suddenly a lot more for the two firms to talk about. IPC specializes in voice-based trading infrastructure and back-end telephony, while GreenKey specializes in web-based application development and speech recognition. “Working directly with GreenKey in some ways is like having GreenKey as an extension of IPC, and IPC an extension of GreenKey,” says Mark Slivovsky, director of global product management at IPC. “We are able to work independently as two distinct companies but still come together on a collaborative application and move everything forward.”

The front-end application the two firms have jointly developed will be launched sometime in the first quarter of 2019. “It sits on top of a broker’s or trader’s desktop,” says Tassone. “Essentially, if that person is intercoming or calling on their IPC turret and across the IPC network, the platform is going to capture their structure, quotes and trades, and display them on the desktop. So it eliminates the step of having to type that information up, and it gives you additional functionality like if you step off the desk and you go to lunch, or if you are late onto the desk, you can just step into your position, look at your desktop screen and see all the different quotes and trades that have been shouted. Until now that has never been available.” 

Once that data is captured, it can be analyzed and fed downstream into trade tickets and risk management systems, according to Tassone. 

The two firms work closely, with frequent office visits and sharing of online communication channels. Customer experience has also been paramount to the success of the partnership. “It is collaborative, not just between IPC and GreenKey, but with customers too—that is the key component here. We work directly with customers day in and day out,” says Slivovsky.