Enhancing the productivity of financial services with messaging and collaboration services was the theme of a Jan. 24 keynote address by Chris Lamb, Senior Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Reuters Communication & Collaboration Services, during INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO East 2007 in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

 

“Why is Reuters working in this particular space?” Lamb asked. “Reuters is known as a news service but the core of their business is that they deliver financial information to the capital markets. Reuters financial information travels to financial markets and institutions worldwide. We discovered several years ago that people were using instant messaging as an advanced form of collaboration to enhance effectiveness as a way to increase and enhance their productivity and effectiveness in the financial services vertical.”

 

 

“We came at this area from the world of the trading desk,” Lamb said. “As it happens, there are three ‘pillars’ or types of things that describe what happens in this field and how Reuters distinguishes itself and provides a value proposition in terms of improving productivity and effectiveness via IP, messaging and collaboration.”

 

“First is communications, which connects everything,” Lamb said. “Second is content, which has been our core competency. Third is a sense of community. The traders are working with and against their counterparts and enterprise IM systems are being horizontally deployed to serve them from companies such as Microsoft and IBM (News - Alert). But those systems don’t lend themselves to being incorporated into a federation of organizations in the industry. The core of what Reuters does, however has more of an extranet flavor to it, and more of a vertical orientation.”

 

“The community is quite large because thousands of workers use IM,” Lamb said. “Trading effectiveness has to do with process improvements and integrating that into the actual workflow.”

 

Lamb elaborated: “The basic business process in finance involves transiting from various states in a loop: the market making news, to viewing market movements, monitoring quote changes, reading stories and doing analysis, getting the full picture on a security, evaluating and comparing securities via analysis, making trading decisions, negotiating trades, executing the trades, and managing the orders. Milliseconds in timing can affect whether you can successfully execute a trade. The object is to boost effectiveness by integrating business and communications processes into the trader’s workflow. With better, faster communications among people and processes, the business processes can move faster. One can’t compromise anything.”

 

“Of course, there are many legacy users,” Lamb said. “But they can be brought into the sense of community to the extent of what they have and what can be done for them.”

 

“In terms of sheer speed, we come at it in terms of the capital markets,” Lamb said. “It’s another one of the core competencies of Reuters. Of course, I remember when I was a kid and the stock ticker was moving 20 minutes behind the trades. Today, things have advanced tremendously. Communications is one of the pillars that accelerate everything, but better communications is no good by itself unless you can get to the relevant content. You have to make portals, to be able to utilize your cell phone and Blackberry to find that proverbial needle in a haystack. There is a whole cottage industry that has to do with providing a content channel.”

 

Lamb continued: “Given all of the communications and connections among people and processes, security becomes very important. It’s all about authenticity and authentication. Reuters technology can actually connect to public IM networks, yet we can maintain a high level of privacy and security. Users of our messaging systems are not bombarded with strange stuff – they can filter it out.”

 

“In the area of community, we must build and maintain contacts via directory functions,” Lamb said. “Interactivity, communications and collaboration must easily occur regardless of any ‘node’ considerations – and we all know there are issues of multi-modality. Sharing the workflow takes center stage. We must face the industry and all provide the state information necessary to assist in providing content and in terms of showing workflow.”

 

“We want to accelerate all major processes, but the connected world doesn’t make things easy simply because things are connected,” Lamb said. “Even so, connectivity has helped all of our jobs immensely. Without today’s advanced communications, I couldn’t have done my job 10 or even five hears ago.”

 

“Opportunities do exist for those who understand the workings of ‘the workflow’,” Lamb added. “Communications and collaboration are really at the heart of all productivity. Any mode at any time, anywhere.”

 

 

Richard Grigonis is an internationally-known technology editor and writer. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert), he was the Editor-in-Chief of VON Magazine from its founding in 2003 to August 2006. He also served as the Chief Technical Editor of CMP Media’s Computer Telephony magazine (later called Communications Convergence (News - Alert)) from its first year of operation in 1994 until 2003. In addition, he has written five books on computers and telecom (including the Computer Telephony Encyclopedia and Dictionary of IP Communications). To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.