London, 25 January 2024 – Specialist technology consultancy Lab49, an ION company and interop.io, the leading interoperability provider for the finance industry, have announced a new joint implementation partnership to modernize the trading desktop user experience for traders, portfolio managers, risk managers, and other financial professionals.
The new partnership will offer buy and sell-side firms access to the complete suite of interop.io solutions and expert professional services tailored to their needs. This is designed to allow finance professionals across the trading ecosystem to better streamline operational workflows, improve trading efficiency, and support their digital transformation and platform modernization initiatives. Most importantly, the collaboration allows product and platform development teams to work more closely, keeping every aspect of the user interface, performance, and security at the center of their solutions.
Benefitting from the partnership and its offerings, an institutional broker-dealer has been able to automate multi-step workflows into a cohesive operations platform, helping its traders focus on business tasks without the need to context switch across multiple separate applications, chat and email. Another successful implementation now sees the equity desk at a major investment manager receiving rich, interactive notifications allowing them to act immediately on trade opportunities from within the notifications themselves. This ability unblocks workflows and reduces the cost of navigating complex blotters and order forms.
Based on these implementations, both partners are motivated to set new industry standards and raise the bar of excellence in the desktop integration domain. Using interop.io’s maturity model, joint clients will benefit from strategic alignment instead of technical compatibility. It will give firms a clear long-term vision with associated milestones to build actionable goals for the next five to 10 years, supporting the successful outcome of strategic digital transformation initiatives.
“Investment banks and organizations in capital markets have been building and developing single-dealer platforms for years, but many incorporate out-of-date technologies in need of re-architecture and re-writing,” said Interactive Practice Head Brian McAllister, Lab49.
“The desktop platforms of the future should consist of apps that are designed to be seamless, encourage users to focus without unnecessary switching from to task to task, and to minimize digital distractions. This can alleviate high-volume context switching error rates which are a significant drag on productivity.
“Platform modernization is an important aspect that becomes increasingly essential to any participant in the capital market space,” McAllister continued. “With interop.io, firms can achieve a better user experience with associated benefits that would be impossible in a web browser or simply too expensive to build from the ground up.”
“Container frameworks, interoperability, and desktop integrations are the future of trading desktops and will be part of sophisticated user experiences going forward,” said President and Co-founder Dan Schleifer, interop.io.
“Building high-quality applications is as much a technology exercise as an opportunity to examine what buy and sell-side users require and how to provide for those needs by creating custom software. These complex applications require collaboration and cross-functional teams, pulling expertise and domain knowledge from users, developers, and vendors. This partnership brings this together.”
In the near term, Lab49 will expand its desktop integration offering and certify its team as an interop.io implementation partner.
To discuss how the partnership can help your firm evaluate your desktop maturity level and provide you with a practical route to achieving successful desktop integration, contact info@interop.io.
As part of the Future of Desktop initiative and the partnership, Lab49 provides additional UX and UI technology assessment engagements to help you understand and drive progress on your modernization journey. To discuss assessments in more detail, send an email to info@lab49.com.
About Lab49
Lab49, owned by ION, is a consultancy that creates bespoke technology in partnership with the most important companies in finance. Its focus on finance and its integrated strategy, design, and product development expertise uniquely positions the firm as a partner capable of delivering best-in-class solutions tailored to clients’ complex and varied commercial and technical needs. Today, Lab49 is an established partner in financial markets, having delivered hundreds of projects for most of the world’s tier-one investment banks and the largest buy-side firms globally.
