Our Global Agility concept is an end-to-end solution that we are delivering to banks – from the underlying infrastructure of the organisation to the turret in the front office – establishing a unique offering from BT. We’ve always been well placed to deal with the voice trading environment and as electronic trading volumes have grown we matched our services to reflect that.
We’ve implemented part of that vision with Scotia Capital. Scotia has got 250 trading positions in Toronto, with a further 100 in its business continuity planning centre outside of the city. What we’ve used effectively with them is dense wave division multiplexing. DWDM allows different channels of data to run across an optical cable by using different wavelengths for each channel. It’s a cost-effective way of realising a virtual operation with two seamless sites in an effective manner.
Having multiple data centres can be difficult to manage even for an IT provider. The point with IP technology is that you really don’t need to worry about the geography of the data centres. We can guarantee that the connection to the data centre is not compromised.
You can have a client that is trading seamlessly in multiple locations – a trader can leave London, go to the New York office and be presented with exactly the same information they would have had in the UK.
At BT, we are expanding globally in many ways other than just in the scale of our network. In the WiFi (wireless internet access) space for example, we’ve got 20,000 hot spots around the world. If you go to an airport, train station or coffee shop, particularly in any major city anywhere in the world, you are going to be able to get high-speed Internet access and secure access to your corporate network.
This is effectively revolutionising the possibilities of flexible working. The boundaries of 3G means that we’re now seeing WiFi start to fill in the gaps before 3G becomes fully realised.
Q Financial services have been hesitant in adopting IP. Is this changing?
A There’s still a lot of negativity about Voice over IP [VoIP]. There has been some scepticism about whether you can genuinely guarantee the class of service with the voice application.
There are many benefits to the adoption of IP – where you have several trading floors across the world connected with an IP backbone, you can effectively treat them as one trading floor. You can have one single business continuity plan from the perspective of data. An investment bank can be a large enterprise with several mission-critical services running on the same network. That makes resilience paramount. At BT, which is the same size as many investment banks, we use IP globally without problem and have all of the business continuity back-up as well, so we don’t see any justification for this negativity.
Unfortunately, as we’ve seen recently in London, the risk of disruption to business from physical threats is still very real. We understand the importance of resilience within a trading environment. Our offering has been built from the ground up, with concepts such as resilience and scalability included implicitly.
There are so many benefits to building your organisation around IP from a networked perspective, and I think we’ll see financial organisations realising that increasingly over the next few years. It has the potential to be the very fibre of your enterprise, giving you the flexibility to seamlessly run and share applications, data and computer resources. For example, there is a lot of excitement around grid computing at the moment and it certainly has a great deal of potential to maximise computing resources at a bank that is processing large amounts of data. Arguably, it is the network that links that grid together as one computing resource and we’re really interested in the future of this technology.
Q How does the takeover of Radianz affect BT’s market proposition?
A This year has seen us complete the purchase of Radianz. This was one of the most significant developments in our offering to the investment banking market as it gives our customers access to over 400 pre-trade, trade and post-trade applications at over 10,000 locations worldwide. This perfectly complements our current offering. A host of applications and services are available via the BT Radianz network, making it a valuable resource for banks and brokers.
This year, iVestigo has announced that it is using the BT Radianz network exclusively for the provision of its risk management solution OpsMonitor. The Tokyo Stock Exchange, Traiana, Winterflood Securities and Fininfo have all announced provision of services and data via BT Radianz this year. The growth of ASP as a preferred method of delivery indicates strong expansion for us. The increasingly global nature of financial services puts the BT Radianz network at the forefront of delivery for services.
Q Increasingly, banks are attempting to measure and evaluate IT use and cost. How is BT assisting with this?
A Regardless of the application, we can look at the performance of that application over an IP-based network. We have a service called AAI [Applications Assured Infrastructure] that enables us to have a look at multiple applications over your existing network, whether is was built by BT, in-house or by another IT supplier. We can see the performance of the application on the network end-to-end. That means we can measure where applications are not performing to their optimum and even isolate users who are misusing their resources and posing a threat to the wider organisation.
From a compliance point of view, AAI has the ability to audit what people are doing on the network and how they are using it. Where banks are trying to get a better grip on technology usage and cost, this is a massive advantage.
In the web-services area, we’ve done a lot of work – one example would be around identity management. We have a service called URU that validates an individual by looking at a series of different public databases and cross-checks that given information about themselves is correct. This is crucial to identifying that private clients are who they say they are when they are giving you instructions about large sums of money.
BT is also doing more for its customers in the area of information lifecycle management (ILM). This gives you the intelligence as to how your data is stored, an audit trail of who used what and where. So you’re not just storing your data en masse any more; the software that runs across your network is prioritising where you store it and how you store it.
With data storage, it is essential that you can access and retrieve the right information at the right time. That is critical. In the past, banks would store anything and everything, which resulted in a retention policy issue. In the trading environment where someone has a query about a particular conversation that has occurred, ILM gives you the power to pull that back at the right point in time.
