Our COO at Glue42, James Wooster was a special guest at the Profit and Loss weekly “In the FICC of It” podcast at the end of February.
Colin Lambert, the host and managing editor of P&L started the conversation focusing on the challenges involved in the digital transformation of workflows and all the various functions related to that, compliance, sales, trading, and risk.
The Complex Desktop
According to James, desktop in a financial services organization is reasonably complex and contains many different applications in a trading environment which often causes a lot of pressure.
Traders need to navigate within and between lots of different applications and most often these applications come from many different places and many different software vendors. They also need to navigate within and between these different applications looking at the multitude of screens and often machines and apps, which is a nightmare.
In an answer to the question of how people deal with the complexities when using legacy apps on desktop, James said that it is important to know what the end-user is trying to achieve since most of them are not technicians and experts.
He believes that it is important to understand the actual journey, from the first application to the last in a particular transaction.
…these journeys need to be streamlined. They need to appear as if all of the data access, all of the transactional capabilities are coming from a single place, a single application.
We think what traders need in particular is a sort of a blend of applications, something that we would call the workspace typically, which contains exactly the right data, exactly the right transactional capabilities, which are displayed at exactly the right time.
The Hidden User Journey
Another interesting topic that James discussed during the podcast was capturing the behavioral journey of a user rather than the functionality of it.
Let, let me just give you a quick highlight. So, if in a particular organization, you know, that trader Fred is, is the best because Fred’s outcomes are better than anyone else’s, then the question is, what is it that Fred is doing. Is it because Fred has a great territory, a great set of clients, or Freddy is a fantastic relationship builder or Fred has been there for 50 years and knows everything that everyone else is trying to learn?
If you were able to understand Fred’s usage of the IT systems and which systems are used and not used, how long they were used for, et cetera, and then you compared Fred with Harry what you could start to do is, is understand the differences in behavior, the difference in systems, the difference in flow.
And if you understand the difference, then you can start to train Harry to be like Fred or in deep, the rest of the team to be like Fred. And so that’s all. Yeah, little old IT integration platform that sits behind the scenes is now able to deliver real valuable insight in the way that I don’t think I’ve seen before.
This is, of course, another proof point to the fact that technology can identify the most efficient use of human resources that a company has available.
To the question of Colin how possible this was to the mobile world as more and more people are mobile working, trading and so on, James Wooster mentioned that progressive web app approach.
Well, PWA, progressive web app is a means by which you can actually forego the need to deploy any software on that remote machine if you like. The integration platform is itself a progressive web app and does not need to be installed. It just runs effectively courtesy of the browser environment, whether you can see the browser or not.
During the podcast, James also touched on topics, like compliance surveillance, integrating notifications from multiple systems, and others.
James Wooster finished his podcast conversation with Colin Lambert from P&L saying that things are getting easier and integration platforms are becoming much, much more capable compared to what they were a year or two years ago.
He believes that the prospects look good in terms of making better use of screen real estate which according to him has been one of the bigger issues for financial organizations.
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