NextPlane Powers Markit Collaboration Services

Real-time communication and messaging is the life blood of the financial services industry. Traditionally, as trillions of dollars in securities changed hands each hour around the world, buy and sell side institutions relied on a patchwork of third-party "walled gardens" and proprietary messaging solutions, and even insecure public IM networks to communicate.

However, as the volume and transaction speed of international financial markets continues to grow, business leaders in the financial services industry have been pressing for an open network where they can connect their unified communication (UC) platforms. This would allow traders, brokers, dealers, fund managers, wealth managers, support staff, and clients to seamlessly and securely communicate with each other as if they were on the same platform.

Until now, it was difficult, if not impossible, for financial institutions to easily connect, communicate, and collaborate via their UC platforms. The missing piece has been any-to-any scalable federation, which makes it possible for users to view presence status and communicate via multiple channels and modes (IM, multi-user chat, voice and video) with colleagues on different UC and IM platforms.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Citi, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, GFI Group, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Thomson Reuters are now connecting their UC platforms using a new open network from Markit, powered by NextPlane's federation technology, called Markit Collaboration Services.

By licensing and leveraging NextPlane's any-to-any federation technology, Markit Collaboration Services will enable real-time communications, including presence, IM, multi-party chat, voice, video, social feeds, and other tools to enable better collaboration among its members, regardless of which platform they use.

Markit Collaboration Services also offers a central directory through which professionals can connect and collaborate. The directory is populated by firms and users and validated by network participants, so users can securely manage their contacts across the financial services industry.

Acting as a federation "clearinghouse," NextPlane will enable Markit Collaboration Services members to federate not only with other financial services members, but with any of the 150 companies and over 600 corporate domains that are part of NextPlane's UC Exchange Service. Many of the UC Exchange Service members are part of the financial services industry supply chain and include IT suppliers, legal advisors, and marketing agencies. In addition, NextPlane's federation technology will provide Markit Collaboration Services members with policies for security and control over the type of traffic (IM, presence, voice, video, and file transfer) that should be allowed or denied across their business network.

For example, banks can enforce policies that allow only specific users from a buy-side firm to exchange presence and chat only with select employees within an organization, or policies can be created to block designated employees from communicating with select banks while allowing the rest of the organization to freely communicate and collaborate.

NextPlane's UC Exchange Service currently supports platforms such as Microsoft Lync and OCS, IBM Sametime, Cisco Jabber, and many more, generating over 1 billion messages each month with leading organizations from industries of all kinds.

The Markit Collaboration Services is empowering the financial services industry to build collaborative business communities and communicate with ease and convenience - and perhaps most important, security.