This is why Dean McGlore from V1 believes that in 2019, we’ll see CFOs switch their focus from AI to automation.

In 2019, automation – also known as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – will move from the shadow of Artificial Intelligence. And rightly so. Like AI, it can relieve teams from mundane and repetitive work to focus on higher-value and strategic activities. But, unlike AI, automation is easier to access, expand. It’s a forecast echoed by experts around the world. Forrester, for example, predicts that the RPA market will reach $1.7bn in 2019 while Advanced has found that 65% of people would be happy to work alongside robotic technology if it meant less manual processes.

Over the next year, we will especially see RPA climb in popularity within the finance function. Teams will use it to automate the data capture and processing of supplier invoices, sales orders and other accounting documents. By automating these manual and usually administrative heavy processes, finance teams can drive unprecedented productivity and efficiency levels as well as benefit from increased visibility into the entire organisation and better data for reporting to the board.

RPA will help with a host of other external factors too. With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) now in place, it will help the finance department (and indeed other areas of the business) get their data in order. RPA is a good starting point for GDPR compliance, as businesses can store, manage and track electronic documents and electronic images of paper-based information in one place and in real-time. This ensures compliance requirements by providing traceability on all documents.

Automation technologies will only be effective if the people using them understand how they work, appreciate their true potential and recognise the value they bring.

And then there is Brexit. Because RPA helps free up time for the finance team, more resources can be devoted to planning for when Britain leaves the EU in March. RPA provides an opportunity for businesses to scale up or down volume to meet demand from outside of the EU, for instance, as well as to assist the development of new products and services for new markets – all of which is essential for business growth. Moreover, with the threat of other countries hiking up tariffs after Brexit, RPA has the potential to replace the need to hire more employees and it can also help keep production costs to a minimum.

Regardless of the reason behind RPA adoption, CFOs will need to make sure that there will be a change in culture among the workforce. Automation technologies will only be effective if the people using them understand how they work, appreciate their true potential and recognise the value they bring. Arguably, investing thousands on pounds on technologies such as RPA won’t be effective if users don’t believe in them. A robust upskilling and training programme is necessary to ensure future digital success.

However, saying that businesses will turn their backs on AI in 2019 was never my intention – Artificial Intelligence will still play a key part of many organisations’ digital transformation plans. What RPA does is allowing businesses to test the water. Planning and testing automation software to see the impact it has on your operations and staff is a great indicator of the benefits that large-scale AI deployment could bring in the future – minus the fear of large-scale failure.

Planning and testing automation software to see the impact it has on your operations and staff is a great indicator of the benefits that large-scale AI deployment could bring in the future – minus the fear of large-scale failure.

In the future, we will see RPA and AI working together to transform the finance function like never before. With a combination of the right technology with AI handling decisions and chatbots managing customer queries, completely unmanned Accounts Payable (AP) for example is perfectly achievable by 2020 as a result of invoice automation.

RPA will be the first step for many and businesses looking to realise the power of automation over the next 12 months should take the following steps:

• Audit your processes and identify which involve low-skills, manual and repetitive tasks, such as many of the core, yet daily finance functions of invoice processes;
• Determine the key technologies that your business needs to become more agile, competitive and productive. RPA and AI have different capabilities, so decisions must be made based on need, rather than hype;
• Understand which new technologies are best placed to modernise or integrate with your organisation’s existing legacy systems;
• Ask yourself what the potential benefits of RPA and AI are to your finance team. Understand employees’ pain points before deciding which digital tools will help;
• Appoint a digital pioneer – someone that will drive positive technology change and that has the backing of your CEO and the rest of the C-Suite;
• Engage with your younger workforce. Typically, they are more digitally savvy and open to change. Find out what technologies they think will make a real difference.

RPA has the potential to change the face of finance for good. And, eventually, it will become ubiquitous among all key processes.

To hear about the importance of reacting quickly to market conditions, Finance Monthly reached out to Vitaly Tyulyaev - the Founder and Managing Partner of ActiveTick LLC. Launched in 2010 with a single product – the ActiveTick Platform, the company has since then expanded into being a leading discount market data vendor for US-based equity, option and future exchanges, in addition to providing order routing connectivity to various execution venues.

Tell us more about the ActiveTick platform? How do traders and investors benefit from your software package?

The ActiveTick Platform is our flagship product that we offer to traders. The platform is a suite of different tools that enable traders to view the markets efficiently and to quickly react to market conditions. At its basic level, the platform provides real-time streaming data to the end user from all supported exchanges, with dynamically updating quote lists, advanced live charts with numerous technical analysis, as well as Level 2 and depth book data. The platform doubles down on functionality with its integrated trading from multiple partner brokers, where users can link their trading accounts with the platform and trade directly from the platform’s charts and order entry screens. Because the platform supports multiple brokers, customers can link their trading accounts from different brokers, and trade in all of them through a single order entry. For more advanced users, the platform offers embedded programming language that allows users to back-test and fine-tune their trading strategies.

The platform suite also comes with its own add-in for Microsoft Excel. The add-in is absolutely loved by our customers because it lets them have real-time streaming data inside their spreadsheets, which automatically drives their calculations with each price change.

Recently, we have added a new addition to our ActiveTick Platform suite - a brand new ActiveTick Scanner product which we have been working on for some time. The scanner is an amazing piece of technology which lets the user choose from over 120 different scan types to be performed on real-time live data, or across from several years of historical data.

Because we control all processes from building everything ourselves, sourcing our own code, running our own ticker plants, managing our own datacenters, and connecting directly to exchanges without middleman present, we’re able to provide the fastest access to data at the lowest prices. Our customers benefit from this arrangement immensely. The majority of our new customers come to us from larger vendors that do not offer as many features as we do, and on top of that, charge them an arm and a leg for the same data that we provide at a discount.

What were the origins of ActiveTick and how did you improve on the existing market offering?

I started my software development career working for a discount broker-dealer called Scottrade. I came onboard with them in the late nineties, and was immediately intrigued by the speed and volume that the trading world moved at. The dot com crash in early 2000 only amplified this for me. I set out to build a trading platform as a pet project of mine, and to my surprise, the owner of Scottrade Rodger Riney welcomed it, and brought it into Scottrade’s product line-up. His acceptance and encouragement allowed me to expand my curiosity about the industry and for the next several years, I coded non-stop, accumulating the knowledge about markets. When Scottrade and I parted, it was a perfect time for me to apply what I have learned and start something new, and that’s when ActiveTick was born. It probably won’t be an overstatement if I say that Rodger Riney had a profound impact on my confidence and thinking, and I am very thankful that our paths crossed.

Starting a new business venture from scratch is not an easy process, especially when it comes to a business where there are ongoing costs from the get-go, such as licensing fees for market data redistribution, and IT infrastructure costs to name a few. Because I self-funded the start-up, it was a race to get to a break-even point, and when it was accomplished, it brought a sigh of relief.

When ActiveTick was created, the mission goal was to provide an inexpensive and functionally better alternative to existing offerings from competition. We had our job cut out for us. In the end, we were able to create such an alternative and pass the savings on to our customers.

What differentiates it from other market data and trading software platforms?

We have several competitive advantages over our competition in market data. First and foremost is our speed. Our datacentres are strategically located at or near originating exchanges, which allows us to tap into exchanges’ data feed multicast backbone with a fiber cable going from our equipment into exchanges’ equipment which cuts our latency to the speed of light. All of our software code that we have developed was written in C and C++ programming languages which provide superb performance. Customers who connect and consume data from us measure data feed latency in nano and microseconds rather than milliseconds. Because we own the whole implementation stack, we can offer very fast data from a large number of exchanges and charge significantly less than our competitors.

In addition to market data, ActiveTick also provides execution routing to over 30 different execution venues from within our datacenters. For one-stop shop experience, customers can connect to a low-latency data feed, access all of our ticker plant services, and route their orders to various destinations.

When comparing our ActiveTick Platform with platforms from some of our major competitors, our toolset matches and often exceeds our competition in terms of functionality and ease-of-use, yet our offerings are priced significantly less.

How did ActiveTick attract its first clients?

First customers were very hard to come by because we were a new company that no one had heard of. Our ActiveTick Platform was still very young, and did not offer all the bells and whistles that it does now. Before that moment, my experience in coming up with and drafting up a marketing strategy plan was non-existent. The marketing budget we had was close to non-existent too. Luckily, there was Google’s AdWords programme, so I tried to learn all I could about SEO, CPCs, PPCs, etc., and then launched a modest campaign that yielded some positive results. Over time, we brought on some outside help in getting better optimisations for our website so we can become visible on search engines’ radars, and invested in marketing and sales departments.

What are the challenges that some of your users encounter on a regular basis? How are these resolved?

Some of our customers often mention information overload. Trading today’s markets is a complex task - there are preferred stocks, moving averages, future spreads, dividend yields, to name a few. Unless someone invests time and effort in learning about these things, it’s hard for that person to understand the data our tools show and use it. Our development team continuously tries to come up with better way to categorise information, and present it in a way that is clear and understandable for the end user.

Over the years, what has kept the company moving forward?

I think what moves us forward, is that everyone at ActiveTick has a real passion for this line of work. There are not that many industries out there that expose you to the large amounts of information in terms of size and speed that this one does. For someone like me who comes from a software engineering background, thinking about how to process 10 million messages per second of OPRA options data feed with latency measured in microseconds is quite overwhelming. I feel the same when working on creating a market data scanner that analyses and identifies patterns inside a torrent of market data, and picks needles out of haystacks. However, finding solutions to such problems excites both us and our customers!

Over the years, we branched out into other aspects of the industry. When I started the company, we provided a single market data product that supported display of US-based equities. With time, we linked up with order execution venues, and signed on a few partner broker-dealers which brought trading functionality to our offering. We have expanded from being a vendor for US-based equities to providing data for options, and later - to currencies and futures. Our business also benefited from expanding into custom development work for our customers, where we offer our expertise and coding skills from our development team to solve customers’ specific needs.

What have been some of ActiveTick’s major achievements recently?

In the last year, we have been undertaking a major effort in enhancing our product line with new functionality, and branched out into supporting futures markets with the integration of CME Group’s exchanges. This was a major improvement in our backend ticker plant software to accommodate 24-hour trading, and provide support for trading complex instruments such as multileg intra-exchange spreads. With the addition of future exchanges, we are now able to cover a wide range of different types of instruments, including equities, equity options, currencies, futures, future options, and spreads. Customers who use the ActiveTick Platform, can now see this entire dataset across a spectrum of different exchanges and instruments within a single chart and quote list window.

ActiveTick Scanner is another major project that was completed and rolled out to our beta-tester group just a few weeks ago. This product is a culmination of approximately 18 months of R&D by our development team, and provides customers with the ability to scan the markets for over 120 different scanning opportunities, and filter results using over 150 different filters in real-time or historical basis. In the near future, we are planning on opening up ActiveTick Scanner API to our developers, so that they can run and test various trade strategies using historical data from the scanner. We are very excited about these new recent enhancements.

What do you anticipate for the company in the near future?

Our company is driven by our products and services, and we make it a priority to stay ahead technologically and work on new and exciting things. Our current major near-term goal is to expand internationally, and integrate our backend systems to connect to additional exchanges from Europe and Asia. On a drawing board we are planning adding support for Euronext, LSE, Deutsche Börse, Shanghai, and HK exchanges. Many of our long-term customers have been asking us to support these exchanges, and we are listening to their requests.

With all the interest around cryptocurrencies these days, we are working on connecting with major exchanges and integrating their market data feeds and order routing in our systems.

In addition to expanding with market data, we are currently developing several additional clients for our ActiveTick Platform, particularly an HTML5 web client, as well as mobile clients for iOS and Android operating systems. Deploying these new clients will provide ActiveTick with additional channels to expand our market footprint.

Another effort that is happening inside our R&D, is a push to learn how AI technology can be applied in our business. Because we are also traders who trade our own money, we are fascinated with possibilities of what could be done when deep learning meets large datasets of historical trade data, and learns how to identify patterns. We have been investing capital and time in this effort, and it looks very promising to us. And as we continue to expand our knowledge and understanding, this will trickle into our products that we provide to customers in a form of new features and functionality.

What excites me for the future is that we have very smart people in our group who are technologists at the core, and get enthusiastic about a challenging task ahead. With evolving technology, toolsets, and standards, it is an amazing feeling to be in the driver’s seat for once.

Website: http://www.activetick.com/

You’ve seen a lot of content, articles, warning and advice on cybersecurity, with hundreds of firms trying to sell you next level cyber protection. So, before you do anything else, you need to know what exactly it is you’re protecting yourself against. Below Suid Adeyanju, Managing Director of RiverSafe, lists 10 threats you need to be aware of.

In early July IBM Security and the Ponemon Institute released a new report titled ‘Cost of a Data Breach Study’. In this study it was reported that that the global average cost of a data breach and the average cost for lost or stolen information both increased. The former is up 6.4% to £2.94 million while the latter increased by 4.8% year over year to $112.57. This shows that cyberattacks on enterprises continue to rise. In particular over the last two years there has been a continual stream of concerning data security breaches.

One of the ways that organisations can defend against attacks is to ensure staff understand and are educated about the cyber threat landscape.

Understanding Threats to your Business

Getting the right technology, services, and security professionals is only a part of tackling the cyber security problem. It is also important that companies get a clear understanding of the cyber threat landscape. This means knowing where these types of attacks can come from and in turn, who is leading the attack (whether it be an individual or group). Often, knowing the answer to these types of questions leads to an understanding of the motive and makes countering the attacks easier. So, in this article, I wanted to highlight the areas of the cyber threat landscape that enterprises should be aware of.

1. Nation State: This kind of hacking is often government versus government. It is often functionally indistinguishable from cyber terrorism, but the defining trait is that the attack is officially sanctioned by a country’s government. These attacks can involve not only hacking but the use of more traditional spying as well.
2. Insider Threat: This is one area where many businesses least expect a threat to come from: inside the business itself. A reportfrom A10 Networks revealed that employee negligence is a major cause of cyber attacks. Employees unknowingly allowing hackers into the business through unauthorised apps. And, on the very rare occasion, a disgruntled employee could try and bring the business down in revenge, so it is always important to investigate who could have access because there is every chance that the threat could come from the inside.
3. Individual Attackers: When you think of the stereotypical hacker most thoughts turn to a hooded youth sitting alone in their room. This is the individual attacker and their motives are often more one of curiosity and learning. They want to see if they can hack a system rather than attempt anything malicious. This is the most neutral cyber threat.
4. Industrial Espionage: Sometimes an unrelated group and other times a rival business, cyber threats that deal with industrial espionage have the motive of creating problems for your business. The most common reason for industrial espionage is to discover the secrets of a rival business, often through spying. However, it could also involve destroying valuable data or, with some IoT devices, physically breaking the technology. Anything that can push a business over a competitor.
5. Cybercriminals: Much like the individual attackers, cybercriminals are an all-encompassing cyber threat. Almost all hackers are criminals in some way and the motives can vary from demanding money, to setting up crypto-mining, to damaging company property. Whatever they do it won’t be a good thing.
6. Phishing and Ransomware: These are some of the most common types of attacks you’ll find cyber criminals performing. These attacks are motivated purely by financials and exist to either scam a business out of money or hold valuable company data at ransom. Sometimes this can be a distraction to hide something more nefarious. Therefore, organisations need to make sure they are prepared for any escalation.
7. Ethical Hackers: An ethical hacker is the opposite of a cybercriminal, as the term ‘ethical’ implies. These types of threats are often undertaken for the sake of a company, and often have been paid for by the business to see if it can hack into its own servers. These hackers test the security resilience of a business and locate areas that are vulnerable, before an ‘unethical’ hacker comes along.
8. Hacktivists: A hacktivist is a sub-set of cybercriminals whose motives are more ideological. As the name references, a hacktivist is essentially a cyber activist. They are using hacking purely to push an agenda, whether political, religious, or otherwise, rather than a financial motive. A hacktivist attack can be something as simple as changing the text on a company website to a more nefarious act that interferes with the day to day running of the business.
9. Cyber Terrorism: While hacktivists don’t always cause damage, a cyber-terrorist will. Just like real terrorism, cyber terrorism exists to bring terror to your business, country and customers. Examples include the attacks on the NHSlast year which aimed to bring systems down in hospitals and cause chaos and fear.

By understanding all the different types of attacks in the cyber threat landscape it can help you build your cyber defence by identifying a motive and being able to trace what kind of opponent your business is facing, as well as if this is an attack aimed primarily at an individual, an organisation or a national-level threat where the solution would be to work with other companies to stop the attack as a team.

If the recent software failures in the financial industry are anything to go by, then disruption to payment systems are becoming the ‘new normal’. This week David O Riordan, Principal Technical Engineer, SQS Group, delves into the benefits of blockchain, in particular in the aftermath of a software disaster.

The VISA card payment outages, Faster Payments issues and disruption to card payments at BP petrol garages, all within the first half of 2018, have caused many to question the regulatory environment around financial institutions. And with the Bank of England and FCA requesting banks to report on how prepared they are for IT meltdowns, stating that any outages should be limited to just 48 hours, the finance industry is under real scrutiny when it comes to technology.

Corporations are now expected to have a Disaster Recovery (DR) and business continuity plan put into place to avoid falling victim to software failures. Nevertheless, what business leaders need to understand is that while no IT solution is completely foolproof, and will likely go down from time to time, the key is knowing how a potential internal failure can be mitigated without affecting the overall performance. This can only be achieved with a well-practiced DR plan that is second nature to the responsible parties and can be executed in the desired timeline. However, this can be both costly and time-consuming to set up. How can such incidents be minimised, or potentially eliminated, in the future? Blockchain is an alternative technology solution business leaders should consider, as it has fraud protection already built-in and is highly resistant to all type of attacks and failures.

Blockchain for Business Continuity

Built-in Fraud Protection:

Blockchain is a de-centralised platform, where every node in the network works in concert to administer the network and no single node can be compromised to bring down the entire system. It is a form of distributed ledger where each participant maintains, calculates and updates new entries into the database. All nodes work together to ensure they are all coming to the same conclusions, providing in-built security for the network.

Most centralised databases keep information that is up-to-date at a particular moment. Whereas blockchain databases can keep information that is relevant now, but also all the historical information that has come before. But it is the expense required to compromise or change these databases that have led people to call a blockchain database undisputable. It is also where one can start to see the evolution of the database into a system of record. In the case of VISA and other payment systems, this can be used as an audit trail to track the state of transactions at all stages.

Ingrained Resiliency:

Additionally, blockchain removes the need for a centralised infrastructure as the distributed ledger automatically synchronises and runs across all nodes in the network by design. As a result, Disaster Recovery (DR) is essentially built in, eliminating the need for a synchronised DR plan. The inability to alter entries in the ledger also contributes to the overall security of the blockchain, improving resilience against malicious attacks.

This is unlike traditional large centralised systems where resilience is provided by failover within a cluster, as well as site-to-site Disaster Recovery at a higher level. Disaster Recovery plans and procedures can be costly due to a large amount of hardware and data replication required. Furthermore, most businesses often do not execute it, so when disaster strikes, corporations are not prepared to deal with the aftermath; as seen with VISAs outage problems.

The Downside of Decentralised Blockchain Technology

Performance:

While blockchain can be used as a system of record, and are ideal as transaction platforms, they are slow compared to traditional database systems. The distributed networks employed in blockchain technology means they do not share and compound processing power like traditional centralised systems. Alternatively, they each independently service the network; then compare the results of their work with the rest of the network until there is an agreement that an event has happened.

Confidentiality:

In its default, blockchain is an open database. Anyone can write a new block into the chain and anyone can read it. Private blockchains, hybrid limited-access blockchains, or ‘consortium’ blockchains, can all be created, so that only those with the appropriate access can write or read them. If confidentiality is the only goal then blockchain databases offer no benefit over traditional centralised databases. Securing information on a blockchain network requires a lot of cryptography and a related computational liability for all the nodes in the network. A traditional database avoids such overhead and can be implemented ‘offline’ to make it even more secure.

Blockchain for Disaster-Relief?

As an emerging digital disruptor technology, no one can say for sure where blockchain technology will ultimately lead. While many have disregarded this technology, the potential is certainly there to attempt to solve some of the most common problems in the digital space.

However, with high customer demands on the increase within financial services and with the combination of a widespread network and substantial cost pressures, IT outages will continue to impact consumer experience. Businesses can minimise potential damage by managing communication effectively and dealing with the technical nature of the outage quickly. With a comprehensive and well-rehearsed data recovery plan, it can not only mitigate outages but maintain standards of service too. This will encourage customer retention, loyalty and growth. Therefore, blockchain should be considered, as it has a built-in check and balance to ensure a set of colluding computers can’t ‘game’ the system; as the network is virtually impossible to crack. As blockchain processing efficiency improves, it will increasingly become a more viable proposition, potentially making traditional disaster recovery unnecessary in the future.

Take a look at the inner workings of any modern enterprise, and there’s a good chance you’ll find IT silos - islands of departmental data only loosely connected across the organisation. Such isolation presents a potential regulatory risk and undermines the rich productivity gains that digitisation should be driving across commerce, and yet these silos are becoming ever more commonplace.

Whereas ten years ago the primary cause for disjointed IT was the existence of outdated legacy systems within operations, now it is the advent of hosted independently-sourced solutions that is driving compartmentalisation across the IT landscape. With some options coming out of operational, rather than capital, expenditure, departmental heads have empowered themselves to take the matter of updating their processes and software into their own hands.

This empowerment has bred productivity gains, as departments have acquired best-of-breed functionality from systems to support their specific needs. Front and back office operations - from finance and business development to HR, logistics and marketing - have been invigorated by the introduction of solutions specifically implemented to fill operational gaps; address deficiencies and bottlenecks; and allow functionality which had been on managers’ wish-lists for a decade.

Unfortunately, these upgrades have often been made without consideration for the rest of the organisation. This narrow-minded piecemeal approach will return to haunt organisations across most sectors in the years to come, if the issue is not addressed on a company-wide basis.

The dangers represented by such silos are already becoming apparent within many firms: Reliability of data, in particular, is becoming ever more important for both regulatory and operational reasons. But if customer information is stored separately by each department that needs it, the numerous versions which a company possesses can gradually digress. In the case of a financial services organisation, for example, a loan approval department may end up holding a different set of data on a client than the online banking platform. The eventual outcome could range from frustrating or embarrassing the customer, to incurring bad debt and regulatory sanction.

At the very least, such a situation is highly inefficient from a business perspective, and an obstacle to good customer service. There are also cost implications in time and money: Time, because it is harder for employees who require data to access it; and money because the charges for storing and processing data are not inconsiderable, particularly given increasing regulatory and security requirements.

Therefore, as digital transformation is helping businesses to address individual operational problems, the time has come to reassess the approach and ensure that the entire information ecosystem is supporting the greater demands of internal and external customers.

Executive leadership must acknowledge that digitisation alone will not enhance information flow, innovation and productivity, unless there is a clear enterprise strategy to ensure information is made available and can be freely interchanged. Without this, content fragmentation is likely to accelerate, creating further challenges to aggregating, connecting and managing the flow of digital content.

There are inherent challenges for businesses looking to safeguard the efficient and secure access to enterprise-wide information, while retaining the benefits of a distributed approach to technology. One approach that is working well for an insurance client currently in a process of change and growth, is to encourage departments to first seek a solution to any IT need they have from one of a ‘family’ of trusted providers.

In this scenario, it is crucial to work with partners who are committed to ensuring the best for your company: whereas some IT providers will be inclined to make a sale of their own software at all costs, others will be happy to recommend a ‘friend’ from the trusted business family, where they feel that their rival can provide a more suitable product.

At the same time, this ’friends and family’ approach encourages supplier firms to work together on inter-operability and connectivity issues, and to adapt their own products, where necessary, to ensure a solution that is both bespoke and easily integrated into a wider corporate system. With such an approach, all the core systems can be hosted under a single roof - our client works with five core suppliers - and the momentum is towards further integration, not divergence, as each new applications is added.

However, even with such practices, institutions of any size can end up running hundreds of applications. It is essential to link those data repositories and ensure that they are accessible to all potential users, with as much ease as possible. This can be accomplished with an enterprise information hub: a unified information platform, which facilitates an end-to-end view of the organisation’s entire ecosystem.

Such a hub is a valuable tool for management and a driver of innovation, as it is used to speed feedback times and analyse data on whole-company performance. It is also invaluable when it comes to increasing efficiency and diligence at the ‘coal face’, by allowing all documents to be viewed on a single platform or device.

As digitisation drives further changes in years to come - some not yet conceived or planned for, the ability to integrate new systems and view operations holistically will be crucial, if organisations are to fully realise potential gains and remain efficient.

Website: www.hyland.com