Financial professionals receive information through diverse dedicated user interfaces and systems built on decade old foundations. With the explosion in information, the consumer space is fast evolving to distribute and capture massive amounts of complex information quickly and in an organized way. Technology has also evolved to handle orders of magnitudes larger data sets. Consumers are effectively viewing and responding to information at home and on the go. In many ways, financial information delivery has not quite adapted to the pace, usability and uniformity that consumer information delivery has. This presentation covers new approaches to accessing and delivering financial information emphasizing practices and technologies that are best suited to disrupt this space. Speech up at http://www.infoq.com/cn/presentations/the-future-of-financial-information-services http://www.perpetualny.com

1. The Future of Financial
Information Services
QCON Shanghai Nov 2013
Amish Gandhi
www.perpetualny.com

2. Finance
Telecom
Media
Amish Gandhi
Founder and Principal at Perpetual: Product innovation and development
for financial, media and telecom
www.perpetualny.com
Financial services background
• Worked at Thomson Reuters for 3 years
– Global Product Manger for Reuters Messenger
– Product manager for financial video service Reuters Insider
MS Computer Science from Univ of Texas, Austin
BS Computer Science from Bombay University
The Future of Financial Information Services

3. Outline
• The rise of consumer internet
– 1995
– 2007
– 2013
• How did we get here?
– Resulting technologies
• Difference between Consumer and Finance
– Innovators Dilemma in Finance
• 10 Predictions for the Future of Finance
The Future of Financial Information Services

4. Rise of consumer tech
Consumer Internet/Tech Landscape Pre 1995
Financial Technology Landscape Pre 1995
Motorola
Pageboy
Financial Service Providers
Service
Distribution
Mainframe

5. 1995

6. 2007

7. 2007
Left to right info flow
Ideo Bloomberg Concept
UI similar to
modern
websites
Electronic notepad reused
like a virtual Post-it
Gaming-inspired system that would
track and display the expertise of
users around the world.
Bloomberg Wherever—allows users
to take a small-scale Bloomberg
terminal device beyond their desks.

8. 2013
Realtime

9. How did we get here?

10. Search
Social
Communication
Ecommerce
Gaming
User Interface
Internet of things

11. Before 1995
?
?
?
?
Search

12. 1995 Onwards
?
?
?
?
Search

13. Search

14. Before 1995
-Snail mail
-/dev/null
Social

15. Comments
Social

16. Social

17. Big Data Ecosystem
Search/Social

18. 3G
WhatsApp
4G
Skype
Communication
BBM

19. 1990’s and pre
$
$
$
$
ECommerce

20. Massively multiplayer online role-playing
game (MMORPG) & Social Gaming
Gaming

21. Consumer Products: Professional User Interfaces
Radian 6
User Interface

22. Internet

23. Technologies Born from Consumer
USER INTERFACE
HTML5
CSS3
Firefox/Chrome
Javascript
JS frameworks
Backbone
Ember
Angular
UI:PROCESS
UCD
A/B testing
Lean
User testing
INTERNET OF THINGS
Sensors
Event driven computing
Websockets vs. http
Bluetooth and other NFC
Material science
Electromyography-sensors
Accelerometers
Speech recognition
Power consumption
…
SEARCH
GAMING
Advanced graphics
Game theory implemented
Advanced GPUs
Advanced GPU programming
MapReduce
Google Bigtable
Google BigQuery
LAMP/Commodity scaling
Lucene
SOLR
Elastic Search
Ajax
Twitter Storm
Apache S24
…
Technologies born from Consumer
COMMUNICATION
Smartphones
Android
ECOMMERCE
iOS
Cloud Computing (EC2)
3G/4G
Online payments
SMS
Mobile payments
MMS
Online payment gateways
iMessage
Bitcoin
Erlang
…
WebRTC
…
SOCIAL
NoSQL
Cassanrda
Hbase/Hadoop
Twitter Storm
Location based services
Natural Language Processing
…

24. Consumer Internet/Tech Landscape
Present
Pre 1995
AWS Android Mapreduce
Bigtable Hadoop Hbase NodeJS
Scala Cloud Computing Big Data
D3.js Coffee Script/Backbone
Data Visualization Elastic search
Nginx Hudson GO R require.js
less/sass/compass, HTML5…

25. Difference between Consumer and
Finance Applications

26. Consumer
Experiences
Open
Connected
Rich
Financial
Experiences
Scalable
Fast
Reliable
Highly competitive high
volume market driven
evolution
Secure
Compliant
Established traditional
business model

27. Innovators Dilemma

28. Technologies Born from Consumer
USER INTERFACE
HTML5
CSS3
Firefox/Chrome
Javascript
JS frameworks
Backbone
Ember
Angular
UI:PROCESS
UCD
A/B testing
Lean
User testing
INTERNET OF THINGS
Sensors
Event driven computing
Websockets vs. http
Bluetooth and other NFC
Material science
Electromyography-sensors
Accelerometers
Speech recognition
Power consumption
…
SEARCH
GAMING
Advanced graphics
Game theory implemented
Advanced GPUs
Advanced GPU programming
MapReduce
Google Bigtable
Google BigQuery
LAMP/Commodity scaling
Lucene
SOLR
Elastic Search
Ajax
Twitter Storm
Apache S24
…
Technologies born from Consumer
COMMUNICATION
Smartphones
Android
ECOMMERCE
iOS
Cloud Computing (EC2)
3G/4G
Online payments
SMS
Mobile payments
MMS
Online payment gateways
iMessage
Bitcoin
Erlang
…
WebRTC
…
SOCIAL
NoSQL
Cassanrda
Hbase/Hadoop
Twitter Storm
Location based services
Natural Language Processing
…

29. Innovators Dilemma
AWS Android Mapreduce
Bigtable Hadoop Hbase NodeJS
Scala Cloud Computing Big Data
D3.js Coffee Script/Backbone
Data Visualization Elastic search
Nginx Hudson GO R require.js
less/sass/compass, HTML5…

30. The Future of Financial Information
Services
10 Predictions

31. Prediction 1
There will be a revolution in financial
information visualization

32. Visualization
-Financial Data is complex & large scale
-Visualization of financial mostly same last 15 years
-Current visualization relies on a variety of charts
-Consumer BigData visualization has evolved rapidly
Products at the forefront
Current
Custom
HTML5 Support/
Javascript API
Prediction 1

34. Prediction 1

35. Technologies in play
Emerging Technology: Present
-Canvas
-Raphael
-Protovis
Prediction 1
Future Technology >3 years:
Gaming Engines

36. Prediction 2
Cloud services will be used much more for
computation

37. GPUs in Finance
•
•
•
•
•
Significant advancement in GPUs for gaming physics engines
High speed computation
Can have 512 cores (<10 in avg. CPU)
Can have 10x bandwidth
100 X fast calculation of typical
derivative model
Pros: Ideal for well defined structured computation
Cons: Not very flexible, steep learning curve
Prediction 2

38. GPU Opportunities in Finance
•
•
•
•
•
•
Derivatives Pricing
Speeding up risk analysis (can take days/weeks)
Trading strategy prospecting (back testing)
HFT (complex event processing)
Tick data (added value data feeds in real time)
Data visualization
High Performance Computing (HPC) to leverage
GPU arrays available on Amazon
Prediction 2

39. Prediction 3
Realtime solutions will be adapted from
consumer world

40. Realtime in Consumer World
Advertising
• Ad serving user real-time
• Capture and process model
Analytics
• Usage in realtime
• Content usage tracking to
adapt strategies
• Usage tracking to manage
load
Prediction 3
Social media data processing
• Multiple streaming sources
• Capture and process model
• Real-time ad response
• Real-time engagement
Messaging and Communication
• 2 way real-time comms
– Mobile
– Desktop
vs - Text
-Images
-Video

41. Realtime in finance
Use-cases
– Exchange streaming pricing
– Reference data access and
display
– Liquidity analysis & risk
– News
– Communication
– Alerts
– Active compliance
…social media
Technical solutions today:
-MQ Series/Tibco
-FPGA processors
-Custom C++ solutions
-Traditional RDBMS
-Rules engines
-Processing
-Storage
…stream processing

42. Realtime Data Processing Model
Price
servers
Market
movement
News
Rates changes
Capture
Stream
Processing
Result
storage
Distribution
Ref: Real Time Data Processing - Technical Terrain by Prakash Khemani
Prediction 3

43. Realtime Data Processing Model
Exchange
price
servers
ticker plants
Aggregates and
indices
News
feeds
Rates and other
adjunct prices
Realtime
modeling
Sensors
-Write-ahead-logging
-At-least-once delivery
guarantees
Best-effort
delivery guarantee
Millwheel
-Large scale fault tolerant stream
processing
-Used for Google Zeitgeist
Persistent queue
-Price queue
-Index queue
-News queue
Capture
Prediction 3
In-memory
database
JMS
-Transactional guarantees
-Strict ordering guarantees
-Limited throughput
Stream
Result
Distribution
Processing storage

44. Twitter Storm: at-least once
processing guarantee for every record
Exchange
price
servers
ticker plants
YARN
Hadoop NextGen
MapReduce
Local state
Aggregates and
indices
Zookeper
News
feeds
Streaming
Rates and other
adjunct prices
Realtime
modeling
Trident: Exactly-once processing mode of
storm. Allows you to seamlessly mix
-high throughput + stateful stream
processing
-low latency distributed querying
Compute node/cluster
Management
Persistent Queue -Pull data from persistent Q
Input
-Scheduling computation
-Maintaining checkpoints
Sensors Capture
Prediction 3
-Does not persist output at every stage
-Keeps track of each record's lineage
-Can replay the data to recreate the records
when needed
-Fast
-Cons: Unordered batch completions, low
guarantees
Pregel
(Built on Bigtable)
All in the same system:
-Event Capture Storage
-Computation State
-Result Storage
Stream Processing
Result
storage
Distribution

45. Realtime Data Processing Model
Exchange
price
servers
ticker plants
Distributed, scalable Time Series
Database (TSDB) written on top of HBase
-Store batches into storage
-Do the aggregations at read time
Aggregates and
indices
News
feeds
Rates and other
adjunct prices
Specializes in exporting key/value data
from Hadoop
Persistent Queue
Input
-Buffer up the updates to many keys
-Do a sequential merge with historical data
Realtime
modeling
Sensors
Capture
Prediction 3
Stream
Processing
Result Storage
Distribution

46. Exchange
price
servers
ticker plants
Aggregates and
indices
News
feeds
Rates and other
adjunct prices
Persistent Queue
Input
Realtime
modeling
Capture
Sensors
Prediction 3
Stream
Processing
Result
Storage
Distribution

47. Prediction 4
Wave of improved general UX

49. Mozilla labs design contest: Flickr @peterheads

50. Prediction 4

51. Prediction 4

52. Prediction 4

53. Prediction 4

54. Prediction 4

55. Prediction 4

56. Prediction 4

57. Prediction 4

58. 1
2
1
4
1
Prediction 4
3
5

59. Prediction 5
There will be a major change in the tiered
architecture with HTML5

60. HTML 5
Offline Database
Cross Browser
Multimedia
Mobile
Offline App support
Geo-location
Improved forms support
Prediction 5

61. Current
Pricing
Engine
Windows/
HTML
Front End
Middle
Layer
(App server with
business and
transformation
logic)
News
Service
Research
Historical
Data
Events
Other…
Prediction 5

62. Future
SOA
(Service
Oriented
Architecture)
Pricing
Engine
News
Service
HTML 5
UI
Research
Historical
Data
Events
A
B
External 3rd party services
Prediction 5
Other…

63. Technologies in-play
• Websockets
Products
– Realtime bi-directional
– Event programming : no http overhead
– Javascript coming to the forefront on top of web
sockets
• Server support for Websockets
Prediction 5

64. Prediction 6
In-desktop communication will be enhanced
with Web RTC and similar technology

65. Communication over financial products
• Skype/Softphones exploded on the web
• PSTN/VoIP/Cellular phones still used in finance
environments
• Communication endpoints will emerge on
desktops & mobile finance apps
– Enabling realtime comm. including video
conferencing
Prediction 6

66. Communication over financial products
Technologies
• Jabber / XMPP
– Open syndication of messaging across networks
• Web RTC will play a big role
• Enhanced on-desktop communication and FIX
integration
• Rise of Erlang for messaging eg eJabberd
Prediction 6

67. The rise of Erlang
•
•
•
•
•
•
Large scale concurrency
Soft real-time
Distributed
Hardware interaction
Software maintenance on-the-fly
Fault tolerance
…. and many more
Prediction 6

68. Prediction 7
Analyst research will take on a much richer
format beyond PDF and will be published to
permissioned microsites
*Same for other frequently shared information
eg earnings calls

69. Analyst Research
• Current analyst research reports
– Static PDF
Distribution through financial
research aggregators
Advanced entitlement
model restricting access.
Physical file sent through
several intermediaries
Prediction 7

71. Relevant Technologies
•
•
•
•
HTML5
CSS3
Web app stack: PHP/Python/Ruby
JS frameworks
– Backbone
– Ember
– Angular
......
Prediction 7

72. Prediction 8
Financial training will be revolutionized to
incorporate gaming and other aspects seen on
consumer web

73. Financial Training
There is a vast amount of financial related training
Series 7
Series 86/87 certifications
CFA prep
Compliance related training
• Education based apps and readers are much more
widely available on mobile
• Financial training will see a rapid adoption of mobile
and gaming based innovations
Prediction 8

74. Technologies
• Game theory
• iOS/Android/Windows Phone
• ePub adoption
Prediction 8

75. Prediction 9
Android based OS will become a dominant force,
starting with consumer banking

76. Android Usage
More than 1 million new
Android devices are
activated worldwide. Daily.
Prediction 9
1.5 billion downloads a
month and growing.
The next 1 billion internet
activations in remote areas
will be on an Android device.

77. Technology
• Android
• vs. Chrome OS
Prediction 9

78. Prediction 10
Direct sensor tracking for assets like
Commodities & Energy

80. Changes
• From vessel to batch level sensors
– Deeper insight into supply chain
• Connected sensors tracing
– Volume
– Quality
– Speed
– Location
• Combined with following real-time data
– Weather
– Transportation
– Government events
Access to high volume, low latency data for new level of accuracy
Prediction 10

81. Predictions Summary
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Revolution in financial information visualization
Much more GPU and GPU cloud computing
Realtime solutions will be adapted from consumer world
Wave of improved general UX on financial terminals
Major change in the tiered architecture with HTML5
Communication will be enhanced with Web RTC & similar
Analyst research go from static PDFs to dynamic microsites
Financial training will incorporate social and gaming aspects
Android based OS will dominate for financial info services
Direct sensor tracking for assets like commodities & energy
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