I introduced Panopticon’s new series of webinars yesterday. Marcus Eder, one of our most senior management consultants, produced yesterday’s event with me. Marcus has over ten years of experience in the implementation of software within financial services organizations and I’ve been working in financial services for over 20 years now, including a stint as a portfolio manager at Putnam Investments.

I’ll start by saying: The integration of static data sources with real-time streaming data is powerful stuff!

The response to the webinar was great! We had over 100 participants from all over the world, including people from the US, the UK, Continental Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, and India. We even had someone from Australia who couldn’t attend since it would have been in the middle of the night for him to watch it live; he’ll watch the recorded version on our website. Based on this fantastic response to the topic, I’m even more confident in saying that interactive visualization tools are the “in” thing for the financial community right now — the most reliable way to gain a true competitive advantage!

In the “What’s My Fill?” webinar, we introduced our tools for Trade Monitoring and showed how they could be used to efficiently visualize the status and performance of their orders on different levels — by sector, trader, country, firm, client, and so on. During the webinar, attendees could type questions to us in a chat room. In the middle of the presentation, one participant from a large financial institution simply typed “So, what IS my fill”? I was a bit surprised at first since that was our main topic for the webinar and we were definitely going to answer that question. What I realized is that he didn’t have time to watch the whole webinar, and why? Because in this market, not only minutes, but seconds separates a winner from a loser. He needed to get back to his business and yet he was so interested in the interactive visualization tools we presented that he took some time to participate in the webinar! That’s why our clients use our interactive visualization tools; they don’t have that (extra) time to spend on reading reports or browsing through tables to find what they are looking for. The information needs to be there, in an instant and in a format that makes it easy to see what you are looking for. This is true for any market these days, whether you’re dealing with commodities, equities, fixed income instruments, CDOs or whatever.

Back in the day, before joining Panopticon, I worked with several large financial institutions and banks. Our main challenges were to find new ways to gain competitive advantages and that was also when I first laid my eyes on visualization tools. That was before streaming real-time was a reality and before there were visualization tools that could be plugged in to any existing system. Today, all I can say is that interactive visualization tools are better than ever before and they will definitely make your life a lot easier. So to answer the question, “What’s My Fill?”, I say that the fill is the tool that gives you that competitive advantage and saves you that extra time. You can use the time you save by using effective visualization tools to give your clients better service. It might sound as a cliché but it’s even more true today – time is money!

Thanks to everyone who participated in yesterday’s webinar and I’d also like to hear from you! Please send me an email (brian.okeefe _at_ panopitcon.com) with your follow up questions. We’re hosting a series of these events over the next couple of months; we’ll announce them on the site and in our newsletters.

Brian O’Keefe
Director of Product Management
Panopticon Software