The Financial Services industry has been worrying for some time now about online collaboration tools. Instant Messaging (IM), in particular, has been causing huge headaches for the IT and Compliance chiefs in the big banks and trading houses.

Traders love using IM to do pre-trade chatting with other traders. It's as if IM was custom-built for them to do just this.

The trouble is (or has been up until very recently), they've been using the same IM tools to do their trade chatting as they use to IM their friends i.e. consumer tools such as Yahoo! Messenger. Secure? No. Archives for regulatory compliance? No.

Whereas more traditional forms of electronic communication, such as email, fax, phonecalls and voicemail have been subject to recording and archiving for regulatory compliance purposes for some years now, relatively newer channels, such as IM, have not.

Hence the Collaboration in Financial Services Conference in New York City on September 29th will:

"address the increasing importance of collaboration and collaboration technologies in institutional financial services, and help individual firms and the entire industry to address the challenges and opportunities of this emerging space.

It will bring together industry leaders to examine the underlying drivers of change including transparency, execution commoditization, and shifts in buy-side/ sell-side information flows in specific market segments, including equities, fixed income, M&A, and syndication. The conference will...examine the underlying drivers of change and the action that should be taken on key issues including:

• The potential and implications of collaborative technologies


• Effective compliance for collaboration technologies


• Collaboration in deal-making: M&A, due diligence, private equity etc


• The shift from email to collaborative spaces


• Online syndication


• The future of research workflow and distribution


• Instant messaging interoperability and implementation


• Creating an industry roadmap for collaboration"

If Collaboration technologies do indeed go mainstream in this sector, this offers huge potential for the researchers and analysts supporting the bankers' research needs.

Just think how you would be able to design, develop and deliver a whole new range of news and research-based products and services directly into the collaborative workflow tools being employed by your users at their trading desks...

Related articles:

• Instant Messaging Graduates To Workgroup Collaboration Tool
  MasterNewMedia 11 August 2004
• Instant Messaging Launchpad For Full Conferencing And Collaboration: YM Goes 6
  MasterNewMedia 3 May 2004
• IM use must be controlled
  IT Week 19 August 2004