Financial Institutions Embrace BT's New Collaboration Service

LONDON, Feb. 7, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- BT today announces that following the completion of successful customer trials, its collaboration service for financial markets is now commercially available.  

Customer trials showed that BT's collaboration service allowed users to spot opportunities, make faster and more informed decisions, provide advice to clients and move to capture client order-flow ahead of the competition.  This allowed them to service their clients better and with greater efficiency.  

Market professionals interact with their clients, colleagues and counterparties through an ever increasing mix of communication channels. When interacting, they need to gather growing volumes of information from multiple sources and applications rapidly in order make decisions and share knowledge and advice.  BT's collaboration service allows professionals to manage multiple real-time conversations over voice, video and instant messaging and to select and share supporting information quickly and easily at the desktop or on mobile devices.  

Larry Tabb, Founder and CEO, Tabb Group, said: "New regulations are changing the market structure for virtually all asset classes in virtually all geographies. As this occurs, it will be imperative for firms to work with their clients around the globe to help them understand these transitions and their impact on liquidity. Being able to integrate both electronic and voice channels into a seamless collaborative environment will become a differentiating feature in a very competitive and changing world."

Howard Boville, head of financial markets and MD trading systems, BT, said:  "BT recognizes that the financial services world is often the first to embrace new technologies and is relentlessly looking for new and more efficient ways of working for competitive advantage.  BT developed this innovative cloud-based collaboration service to continue to drive the industry towards faster, more informed communication and decision making in a flexible, scalable manner which is adaptable to market or regulatory changes."

Notes to editor:

BT's collaboration service provides a number of key benefits to the trading community.  These include:

• A fully customisable user collaboration panel, support for trading turrets, phones and instant messaging systems.
• Its federated identify management capabilities mean that authentication and collaboration between a firm and its trading partner is faster and more secure;
• Users can initiate, track and respond to multiple concurrent conversations with clients, colleagues and trading partners across a blend of instant messaging systems, phone and trader voice systems, video and social media communication systems;
• Applications such as client management, order management and risk management applications, as well as news and financial information systems, and can be integrated via the open standards interface.  This information can be quickly and easily selected and shared to support verbal or electronic conversations;
• Users can quickly see internal colleagues and counterparties and their online presence;
• Users can quickly switch to a different mode of communication while in a conversation, for example instant click-to-dial, conference or intercom while in an instant message;
• No need for system 'rip-and-replace' as applications can be added at a later date;
• Scalable cloud based technology with the option of flexible "pay-as-you-go" commercial models;
• Enhanced compliance through an intelligence layer which sits above each of the communication channels and helps to identify and retrieve recorded information; and  
• Ability to be embedded into a company's own network environment, as well as accessed through by the 14,000 member sites available on the BT Radianz Managed Infrastructure.  

Supporting information about what BT offers the global financial services sector:

The world's top exchanges, top global broker-dealers, top global fixed income securities firms, the world's top investment managers and the world's top hedge funds are all part of the BT Radianz managed infrastructure which is made up of 14,000+ members with access to over 450 service providers.

• One in three traders (68,500 traders) worldwide use a BT turret.  

• Over 25 years' experience  of managing delivery to multinational organisations with over 1,500 highly-specialized financial technology and business professionals.

• Global reach which extends to over 60 countries and to many developing markets, including Russia, Brazil, Korea and Taiwan, with more new markets to come.  Around 300 customers in Russia are on the BT Network.

• Over 20 million+ card payments worth over 25bn pounds delivered, authorized, cleared and settled daily over the BT Network every day.

About BT

BT is one of the world's leading providers of communications solutions and services operating in more than 170 countries.  Its principal activities include the provision of networked IT services globally; local, national and international telecommunications services to our customers for use at home, at work and on the move; broadband and internet products and services and converged fixed/mobile products and services.  BT consists principally of four lines of business: BT Global Services, Openreach, BT Retail and BT Wholesale.

In the year ended 31 March 2010, BT Group's revenue was 20,911 million pounds.

British Telecommunications plc (BT) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of BT Group plc and encompasses virtually all businesses and assets of the BT Group.  BT Group plc is listed on stock exchanges in London and New York.  

For more information, visit www.bt.com/aboutbt

SOURCE BT