The globalization of worldwide financial markets has caused the majority of the world’s largest financial services companies to expand internationally. Trading floors are now located all over the world and traders must work extended trading hours to keep up with financial markets that are open 6 days a week, 23.5 hours a day. In the high-speed, high-pressure world of trading, where a delay of seconds can mean millions of dollars in lost revenue, robust, flexible trader mobility capabilities are critically important as they enable a trader to continuously trade and to provide uninterrupted client service from any location.

The constant quest to establish and maintain competitive advantage in the high stakes trading environment is increasing the expectations of IT managers in trading firms and is driving them to optimize their use of communications technology and to seek seamless mobility solutions for their traders. Without such solutions, traders and firms are unequivocally at a competitive disadvantage.

Traditional trading environments have tied traders to a specific desk and to a specific turret at a specific address. This model has recently evolved and, thanks to IP-enabled global free seating (also called hot desking), traders are now able to access their full communications resources and positions exactly as they would appear on their home desktops, including button layouts and connections to counterparties, from any other trading floor within the enterprise. Global free seating uses database synchronization to ensure that a trader’s button sheet appears at any enterprise site when he logs into his turret with his ID.

Global free seating depends not only on the synchronization of a trader's profile, but also upon the availability of and connectivity to a trader’s actual private lines. There are three ways to ensure that a trader's private lines are available from any turret within the enterprise. First, by leveraging the reach and resiliency of TDM and IP networks, all trading locations can be networked together to provide real-time line sharing between sites. This not only gives traders access to their lines regardless of where they are, it provides the additional benefit of line status and barge-in capabilities, giving a trader all the flexibility, efficiency, and collaboration that he’s accustomed to when trading at his home site. Second, a carrier redirect service may be used to redirect or reroute lines from a primary site to an alternate site. Third, IP and SIP enterprise voice services are able to provide forked delivery of private lines to multiple locations simultaneously, requiring no rerouting at all. The ability to instantly deliver private lines to any location is the unequivocal foundation of reliable, flexible enterprise mobility capabilities.

While providing traders with instant access to their home desktop profiles from any worldwide enterprise location is a key mobility capability, modern traders increasingly require even greater flexibility. The technology that has revolutionized consumer culture and led to advances such as the Internet, e-business, smart phones, and IM is shaping expectations for all trading-related communications capabilities, including mobility capabilities. In order to best serve the needs of a younger, more tech-savvy end-user, communications providers should provide trader mobility solutions that offer more than simply a way to minimize trader downtime in the event of a disaster or a way to easily, conveniently move among trading floors. They must provide traders, and those who support them, with the tools they need to communicate and trade in a number of different situations: while commuting to the office, while at lunch with a client, on the road from a hotel, or from a home office. The ultimate goal of mobility solutions is to enable traders and their support staff to stay effortlessly, seamlessly connected with each other and with their clients anytime, anywhere.

The increased focus on IT spending within trading enterprises and the need to provide comprehensive mobility capabilities to the trader that are flexible, scalable, and cost-effective are increasingly driving IT managers to deploy IP technologies in the trading room. With IP, automated/predictive routing of communications is achievable. IP systems are able to reroute both trading data and multiple voice traffic streams to any location or device, allowing a trader to remain productive and client-focused in any location. Additionally, open standards such as SIP are ensuring interoperability between systems, networks, devices, and users. SIP is providing IT managers with underlying technology that supports increasingly greater mobility capabilities for their traders as it enables the convergence of voice, data, and desktop applications.

The most basic trader mobility capability lets a trader seamlessly route calls from his turret to an external, PSTN-connected mobile phone. SIP technology helps an enterprise go one step further as it enables dual, simultaneous presentation of calls at a second destination, either another turret, a PBX-connected phone, or a mobile phone.

More sophisticated, robust mobility solutions should extend the multi-media, multi-channel turret functionality to the PC and laptop. The soft turret, as with all mobile solutions, is a key mobility enabler for both BCP and convenience/remote access purposes. To meet the demonstrated needs of customers, a simple, trader-friendly soft turret solution should be browser-based, should support the turret’s core telephony functions (including direct lines, DID numbers, directory contacts, and conferencing) and support both handset and speaker channels. It should also provide a large subset of features found on the trader’s desktop, including all productivity and collaboration tools such as IM, video conferencing, CRM integration, and presence. No additional hardware and little additional backroom infrastructure should be needed to support this critical enterprise solution. An Internet connection is all that should be required to allow traders to instantly trade using their own customized desktop from any location.

The new breed of tech-savvy trader often demands even more mobility than the soft turret provides and would like to create a customized desktop on his Blackberry or Windows-based pocket PC/PDA device. Such a thin client application should provide a full mobile platform for emails, market data, and in-house enterprise systems, enabling truly untethered, full mobility for the trader.

Importantly, the need for regulatory compliance underlies all mobility solutions. Compliance regulations vary by country and region but dispute resolution procedures are uniform across the globe and require that voice communications be recorded and archived. In an IP environment, voice recording follows the trader, not the desktop, thereby providing the ideal means of ensuring compliance for all mobility solutions. It proactively delivers IP voice to the recorder which eliminates security concerns regarding passive listening of network traffic. Centralized architecture with distributed backup equipment located in secure facilities further ensures uninterrupted, secure recording capabilities.

With more focus than ever before on IT spending within trading firms, IT managers require more than just discrete mobility products for their traders. They require robust, integrated, scalable solutions that meet the demonstrated needs of traders and provide clear, justifiable, and measurable business benefits. Given this more scrutinized IT environment, IT managers have increased expectations for their communications technology. As a result, to truly provide value in the trading world, communications providers must function as more than mere vendors to customers. They must function as true customer partners who are willing and able to work with a customer’s other partners to develop a wide array of innovative, flexible, and customizable mobility solutions. Such solutions must extend the reach of traders, enabling them to trade continuously so as to provide excellent client service, maximize sales opportunities, generate increased revenue, and gain competitive advantage. The end goal for communications providers is to provide seamless trader mobility solutions that allow a trader to effortlessly trade anytime, anywhere, and any way.

Jonathan Morton is Vice President, Global Customer Solutions at IPC,
212-858-7971; email: jonathan.morton@ipc.com; web: www.ipc.com.