Amid a global transition towards converged IP, financial institutions were left with a missing link in the trading floor. Prior to IP Trade, no trading turrets were available that didn’t require the use of a proprietary voice switch. IP Trade was formed specifically to address this deficiency in the trading environment.

With their extensive experience of both IP Telephony and banking software applications, the IP Trade founders decided to build the most reliable and secure VoIP trading turrets, compatible with leading IP-PBX’s.

In order to support the key UK financial market IP Trade sought a partner with experience and pedigree in the dealing room environment, hence the AVT partnership.

AVT have been providing solutions and services to the financial services sector since 1991, providing voice recording and dealing floor solutions to some of the largest institutions in the world, and are one of the largest independent voice specialist and system integrators in the UK.

The business case for IP telephony in the Trading room.

The development of IP telephony (IPT) has advanced significantly since the major vendors launched the first systems in 1999. Up until now IPT has been deployed for mid and back office functions of financial institutions, but a secondary vendor is purchased to deliver the front office, trader communication infrastructure and services.

IP Trade believes that isolating the trading floor from today's feature rich, highly available and secure IP-PBX limits the institutions ability to realise advantage in the following areas;

• Significant TCO reduction - through reduced capital outlay, simplified management of a single environment and reduced support costs
• Increased productivity - by delivering a converged environment, where for the first time the trading communication platform is integrated seamlessly into the voice application layer, thereby providing truly open standards.
• An enhanced business continuity strategy – multi-site support with hot standby servers provide the customer with cost effective trader voice delivery. Global free seating provision lets a user trade add-hock from any cooperate site, your DR facility or the trader’s home even when the main site and switch is inaccessible.

IP Trade is delivering the first secure, highly available trading turret that integrates seamlessly into the IPT infrastructure as a SIP endpoint, and delivers all the functionality required by the most demanding traders. It has been engineered to provide this full range of features within VoIP environments including Avaya, Cisco.

Trading Room Telephony Features

The Profile-IK, SK & EK trading turrets support 6000 shortcuts, Intercom, Private lines, up to 6 hooks and speakers mixingup to 60 channels. Active Voice recording can be delivered directly to a variety of IP based recorders. The optional video camera allows video calls to be intuitively placed and received.

• In addition, the inherent IP-PBX features can be easily configured to enhance the value to the trading community.
• IP Trade enables the IP-PBX to operate as a non-blocking switch (patent pending).
• The IP Trade system includes an in-built intercom system – no need for a separate system.
• The IP Trade turret supports up to 60 Speaker Channels with no additional hardware or professional services to implement – all other Turrets require additional Hardware and out-of-hours installation.
• IP Trade is the only turret to support Video distribution to the turret with no additional software or hardware.
• IP Trade is the only turret to support Avaya Active Directory integration and fully searchable Voice Recording playback to the turret.
• Software only turret.

Reliability and Availability

The Profile-IK, SK and EK trading turrets are built to ensure high availability.

• IP Trade turret can connect to clusters of IP PBXs, and provide 3 Gigabit Ethernet (10/100/1000 over UTP) ports that can be used to connect up to 3 different switches or external devices with a sub-second convergence time plus access layer distribution that can be tri-homed to the network There are no moving mechanical components present within the device.
• The core software is customized by IP trade to ensure excellent reliability, but retain the benefits of utilising open standards and non-proprietary operating systems.
• The IP Trade Turret is also a key tool for improving the effectiveness of the bank's traders. Apart from the inherent ability to trade from any turret on the corporate network and at home, a range of applications are available that deliver real productivity gains.

Application Integration

The IP Trade turrets are built on extremely powerful and versatile software and hardware architectures, including a15-inch touchscreen with force feedback. Processing power is delivered via a dedicated dual X86 processor, including video capability. A highly proven embedded operating system, offers the institution the foundation for many types of application support.

These include:

• Encryption of integrated voice, video and trade detail recordings
• LDAP synchronisation with Outlook
• Automatic trade detail entry, via speech to text
• Presence and collaboration
• Smart Card based authentication and encryption
• Video calls, video streaming and TV channel presentation

Role of the IP Trade Application Server

The IP Trade application server is the main building block of the user mobility feature and the repository of the user profiles which include the shortcuts and screen configurations. It is also IP Trade's gateway to the back office systems using web services (SOA architecture) and provides all the traders custom features.

IP Trade Lite   

This new turret will provide users with the same GUI as the IFF and three audio channels - Options are 2 handsets 1 speaker, 1 handset 2 speakers or 3 speakers, all including intercom.

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