BT is "the perfect partner"

We're the best… and still innovating

Walt Terbrusch, head of sales, North America, BT (pictured centre with Waters' Editor-in-Chief, Victor Anderson, Pam Friedberg and Tommy John), collected the Best Cloud Provider to the sell side award on behalf of BT at this year's Sell Side Technology Awards 2013 in April.

At their core, cloud environments come down to three things: scale, connectivity and security. BT has all three areas covered in spades with its BT Radianz Cloud, said the magazine's Anthony Malakian, in an interview with BT Radianz CTO Michael Cooper on the occasion. But far from resting on its laurels, BT is continuing to evolve and develop innovative new solutions for new market conditions, Michael Cooper said.

"We're not in a market that's stationary - it's evolving due to cost, regulatory and business pressures, and we've evolved our capability consistent with that, whether it means extending to São Paulo or Shenzhen or introducing independent functionality," he said. He spoke of BT's most recent developments including the launch of BT Radianz Venue Interconnect which grows BT's global footprint and offers improved latency access to trading venues, as well as its private wire solution delivered over the BT Radianz Cloud.

"We have something in the order of 35 per cent of the world's markets for turrets, providing the ability to push a button and have a direct call - with no call centre in between," he said. "What this capability does is move that into an IP-based or 'soft' context, which now makes it more flexible and location independent, but still provides all the functional characteristics that you had before."

Read the interview

Two more awards for BT

BT Radianz carried off the Best Cloud-based Services Provider award 2013 at the Waters Rankings 2013, which were presented in New York this month. Hosted by Waters magazine, and voted for by its readers, these rankings allow firms to vote for their best financial solutions and technology providers.

BT's Assure Analytics' data visualisation tool SATURN, which helps predict and protect against cyber attacks, was also honoured at the S&C Magazine Awards Europe in April, where it won the top innovation award.

SATURN runs rings round cyber attacks

Mobile recording hits the US

Mandatory mobile recording came into force in the UK in 2011, and it has taken almost two years for firms to converge and standardise tried and trusted solutions.

A similar process is now happening in the US as a result of the Dodd-Frank regulation. Firms had to introduce fixed device recording at the end of 2012, and now have to record interactions on mobile devices, too, in order to remain compliant. The FCA and Dodd-Frank rulings affect all electronic communications including phone calls, emails and SMS messages to or from all mobile devices including mobile phones. In the UK, recordings must be held for six months and in the US for one year. It's a tough job to remain compliant with these obligations, but BT has the track record to help you navigate the technology required. Read an interview with Fernando Gomez-Evelson (pictured), who leads the BT mobile voice recording portfolio on the ways BT can help you meet the challenge of new regulation.

BT at the forefront of the financial technology debate

In the current environment, much of the stability of the world's financial markets depends on innovative, fully-managed products and services coupled with in-depth industry knowledge and global reach. The role of IT within the organisation is also changing as CIOs grapple with new challenges like the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend.

On 19 June, Clive Selley, CEO BT Technology, Service & Operations and Group CIO, BT Group talked about CIO best practice at an FT Live event in London.

The consumerisation of IT and big data were on the agenda at The CIO event North America held in Marina del Rey, California on 20-21 June, where Mark Akass, CTO BT Global Banking and Jason Cook, CTO BT Americas, were both featured speakers.

The potential of big data was again discussed along with Bitcoin at the Future of Fintech debate organised by Interxion at Canary Wharf's new technology accelerator space Level39 in London on 27 June where CTO, BT Radianz services Michael Cooper, was a lead speaker.

Full of hot air? Using balloons to bring faster trading connectivity

Balloons may be the oldest successful human carrying flight technology, but they're also a serious candidate in the race to provide increased connectivity between vital global financial trading routes.

Airborne technology such as balloons, drones, and earth-orbiting satellites may sound the stuff of sci-fi fantasy, but they could very well provide a very credible alternative to microwave lines – the latest innovation to be adopted by traders.

Microwave lines allow information to travel around 35 to 50 per cent faster than via fibre-optic lines. Some of the most important global trading routes already use microwave technology, including New York to Chicago. However, size, weight and height installation requirements put limitations on the locations where the microwave lines can be used.

Connectivity via balloons wouldn't share those issues, and present a realistic case for further exploration – for many years they've been used to gather and extend the range for military radios and metrological information, and in theory, they can remain airborne indefinitely.

So we may be talking about developments in one of these airborne options in the not too distant future, as the battle to shave another millisecond off securing trade deals continues. If the results are valuable enough, someone's going to go ahead and make it work.

Beware of venture capitalists bearing gifts...

Financial firms should beware of technology firms that are being acquired by private venture capital firms, warns Chris Pickles in a recent blogpost.

Two major financial institutions in the USA are planning to move away from technology providers who have recently been acquired by private equity/venture capital firms in order to de-risk their own use of IT for trading. Other technology providers too are at risk of acquisition, says Chris. "Having worked with the venture capital industry in the USA and Europe in the 1990s, one thing that I learned from that sector was that before a private equity firm invests in anything, it first plans its exit. The intention is generally not to be a long-term investor but to increase the value of the investment and then to sell it on to someone else (preferably via an IPO to get the best price for it).

"With a depressed market for financial technology and a global economic crisis, perhaps now is a good time to buy technology providers while their corporate value is low. But that also raises the issue for the customers of those firms as to what the future may hold. In a sector where market regulations like MiFID and industry guidelines like Basel II address operational risk – not just in terms of business operations but in terms of technology operations as well – considering the future of financial technology suppliers also has to be part of an institution's compliance regime"...read more

BYOD - the genie is out of the bottle

The consumerisation of IT– so-called Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) – is a global phenomenon and an unstoppable trend. As more and more employees bring their own smart devices into the workplace, potentially overloading networks and increasing security risks, can and should banks embrace the consumerisation trend?
BT's new portfolio can help you make the most of the BYOD trend.

BT and Cisco have also commissioned research on the take up of BYOD - download the research summary here (pdf) or view the infographic.

Hong Kong: smartphones for a smart city

There are a billion smartphones in the world. That number is set to double in the next three years – and Hong Kong has the second highest penetration of smartphones in the world...read more

When times get tough, the tough get innovating

To innovate is even more essential today, in a tough economy, than it has ever been – and we are proud to have been at the forefront of innovation for at least 150 years. We can trace our innovation history back to the pioneers of the GPO research organisation who, at Bletchley Park, invented the world's first programmable electronic computer...read more

SATURN runs rings around cyber attacks

Historically, spotting and tracing cybercrime has been a lengthy business, meaning the perpetrators are long gone by the time the cyber sleuths have worked out the origins of an attack. But BT Assure Analytics crunches through massive amounts of raw data in minutes to display the result using visualisation tools that make it easier for people to get to grips with what's happening...read more

How voice recognition is keeping vital processes secure

Huge developments in voice recognition technology are revolutionising some of the most security conscious customer service processes around, says Alex Noble, CRM Specialist at Cisco...read more

Legacy, security and BYOD

Rationalising legacy systems and conventional network approaches and migrating to a cloud environment make it easier and more cost-efficient for firms to secure their internal systems from external attack and more practical for them to implement new technology approaches like BYOD...read more

BYOD - how can CIOs make it happen?

With all the world talking about how BYOD is set to change the way we work forever, little thought is given to the CIOs expected to help make those changes happen...read more

Removing assumptions about data integrity

Security of data is not only about encryption and protection – it starts from a basis of whether you're secure in relying on the data in the first place...read more

It's a small world after all

Banks are increasingly embracing globalisation, and are looking to build their presence in new markets and to support the growing global presence of their customers. For example, Myanmar is starting to attract a large number of visitors and is increasingly becoming an interesting market for investors around the globe...read more

The IT sector's best kept secret

What explains the success of WAN optimisation technology? What are some of the underlying drivers?...read more