For financial companies offering services on the Internet, function generally trumps form. Whether for meeting internal data requirements or for transactions on markets or with clients, systems must deliver maximum firepower with a minimal number of clicks, and computer screens are designed accordingly. Fancier graphical user interfaces — GUIs in Web development parlance — are concerns for programmers of video games, not trade-order management systems.
But now that the online population — financial firm employees and customers included — is growing accustomed to the interactive wonders of Google Maps, iPods and TiVo recording devices, industry technologists are getting into the GUI game. They reason that unless they modernize old, static Web pages and keep up with the Amazons and Apples in terms of user experience, known in the trade as UX, they will look slow and stodgy and lose touch with the wired generation.
“Some of this is ugly,” Vivake Gupta, a co-founder and managing director of London- and New York–based financial systems consulting firm Lab49, says of the securities industry’s more hidebound Web designs. “We have to think more in UX terms,” he notes. Adds Craig Saint-Amour, Microsoft Corp.’s director of capital markets industry solutions, “If you don’t develop a deep user experience to attract and retain clients, they will go somewhere else.”
Although point-and-click efficiency is still essential for trading, the explosion of market and data volumes has GUI developers scrambling to create so-called rich user interfaces for risk management, strategy development and other analytical purposes. More-sophisticated screen presentations enable traders and analysts to digest and react to large amounts of information in less time. Among the new visual ingredients are three-dimensional imagery, animation and color schemes that can signal changes in market patterns far more quickly and effectively than do ordinary rows and columns of numbers.
Lab49, for one, has set up an advanced data visualization practice to put these capabilities into action. One result of this effort is LongView Trading, the order management system of France-based software company Linedata Services. “Significant user interface enhancements” are a key element in the latest version of LongView, which began rolling out last year after a collaboration with Lab49, according to Linedata executive vice president of business development Jack Wiener. Linedata consolidated onto a single screen the multiple windows, monitors and systems that traders traditionally had to bounce among.
“The point of technology is to see more data, faster and with finer resolution, so I can interact with it in better ways,” says Lab49 co-founder and managing director Daniel Chait. “Now people see that there is an alternative. It’s managing the attention of the user as much as the information.”
Another case in point: a Web application that Charlotte, North Carolina–based Wachovia Corp. uses for balance-sheet management. Known as the bank funding efficiency dashboard, and running on a Microsoft technology platform, the system “helps Wachovia’s treasury to monitor Wachovia’s position at the Federal Reserve,” explains Gunhan Tatman, vice president of application development for Wachovia treasury finance technology. “It’s a tool that helps central funding to make trading decisions. The application pulls data across the organization, correlates it and allows better trading decisions from a funding perspective.”
Also on the rich-interface bandwagon is Asset Control, a Netherlands- and New York–based provider of data management systems to major financial institutions including Barclays Global Investors and Wachovia. Richard Enfield, an Asset Control product manager, notes that “richness has always been a critical component” in delivering data that can be scanned and comprehended intuitively, but improvements in GUI technology make it more accessible — and imperative — in finance. “Information must be presented in a way that users can clearly understand,” says Enfield. “Their experience level makes them more comfortable in a technical-style environment.”
To be sure, financial data providers and managers aren’t losing sight of the fundamentals: The information must be served by, and not become secondary to, GUI fads and fashions. “We have to provide dynamic information,” says Donal Byrne, CEO of Corvil, a Dublin-based supplier of trade-network management systems to exchanges, investment banks and hedge funds. First and foremost, however, software must “withstand the volumes and conditions of the market.”
But now that the industry is increasingly up to speed on GUI and UX, “they ask for it more,” says Lab49’s Chait. “You can make something that looks good and increases the density of information conveyed by using these new technologies.”
