IPC, a leading global provider of secure, compliant communications and networking solutions for the financial markets community, and GreenKey Technologies, creator of patented voice software with integrated speech recognition designed specifically for the financial markets, today announced that they have jointly been awarded the 2018 American Financial Technology Award (AFTA) for “Best Partnership or Alliance.”

Since early 2017, IPC and GreenKey have combined voice and artificial intelligence (AI) to allow traders to easily access a visible, transcribed stream of transaction threads, breaking new ground in data optimization, customer relationship management and workflow empowerment.  Their collaboration unlocks the value in voice communications by bringing together IPC’s trading communications expertise and cloud financial ecosystem of over 6,600 diverse market participants with GreenKey’s next-generation machine-learning technologies.

“Voice is arguably the most valuable source of data left to be digitized in today’s financial markets and AI is arguably one of the top technologies set to transform its future,” said Bob Santella, Chief Executive Officer of IPC.  “Along with GreenKey, IPC is honored to be recognized for the transformative and seamless efficiencies we are jointly bringing to traders globally, to flow from chat and instant message to more complex voice trading communications.”

GreenKey Founder Anthony Tassone said: "The IPC and GreenKey partnership is completely transforming sales and trading workflows.  We are rapidly building innovative desktop applications that unlock voice data, enabling our front-office customers to gain efficiencies by shedding administrative burdens. We’re grateful to Waters for this prestigious recognition."

Working collaboratively, IPC and GreenKey have brought a powerful AI-based speech recognition solution to market which enables IPC customers to harvest their audio streams as structured text data to enhance front-, middle- and back-office workflows. 

GreenKey’s speech recognition engine, called “Scribe”, specializes in “Financial Market English” to deliver the fastest and most accurate speech-to-text possible for capital market participants. Scribe’s language and acoustic models are trained on thousands of hours of market-specific content such as real-world broker/trader conversations, earnings calls and central bank conferences. The firm offers Scribe in multiple languages.

Interpretation is available via GreenKey’s proprietary natural language processing (NLP) libraries called “Product Interpreters” that extract quotes from densely transcribed audio streams or files.  For the first time, firms can unlock the “tribal” dialects of trading and leverage the data from the conversations.  Scribe is a highly customizable, containerized, Linux-based application set which can run on-premise or in the cloud and via real-time audio streams or historical audio files.

The two companies are also collaborating on a new co-development effort that provides regulated users the ability to:

• Convert a user's voice quotes and trades into a streaming transcript unfolding in real-time and displayed on desktop or mobile devices.
• Parse quotes and trades alongside conversational raw text. 
• Create a more real-time internal price data feed for organizations and enable easy scanning of multiple conversations for faster trading. 
• Access an activity dashboard integrating instant message and voice call transcripts, in-stream orders and quotes -- all data fed into compliance, surveillance, business analytics and CRM systems.

“Alliances between technology vendors play a crucial role in providing capital markets firms with the specific products and services they need to navigate an increasingly complex marketplace,” said Victor Anderson, editor-in-chief of Waters magazine and WatersTechnology. “This win illustrates IPC’s willingness and flexibility to collaborate with other technology specialists to the benefit of its clients.”

The AFTAs, hosted by Waters Magazine and waterstechnology.com, recognize excellence in the deployment and management of financial technology within the asset management and investment banking communities.