State of the Art Visualizations Transform a Trading Platforms User Experience

For many firms, the effort needed to construct a quality front-end, in addition to meeting core development and infrastructure requirements, often leaves development teams scrambling. Sacrifices are often made that compromise the vision and goals of the final product. However, opting to cut corners or save money on the front-end can be a big mistake, especially considering the ongoing demand from active traders for a professional and user-friendly interface (UI).

This company is a large global provider of multi-asset trading and investment infrastructure, market data, and trading workflow technology and analytics for buy- and sell-side institutions. Members of the product marketing team recognized that charts are a cornerstone application of every trading platform and were about to make a significant investment in their front-end. Given they are serving institutional end users who demand quality and high performance, they knew that delivering differentiated value would require going above and beyond today's table stakes. Accordingly, rather than attempt to build a charting solution themselves, they sought out a third-party firm that is an innovator in visualization tools and one that had a shared vision of the future of the trading desktop.

Pain Points

Members of the product marketing team wanted a UI that could deliver high-quality charting, while enabling them to get to market quickly. Important capabilities included having:

• A data agnostic solution to integrate a spectrum of different data sources into a chart.
• A library of trading and analysis tools, such as order books, market depth charts and trade history displays.
• The ability to execute or modify and order directly from the face of the chart without leaving the screen.
• Provide custom trading analytics to understand the liquidity of the market.
• Deliver a solution that meets the demands of professional traders who are concerned with every millisecond of performance.
• ChartIQ had not only the right type of technology but was also a vendor who shared a vision of the future of the trading desktop.
  
  

Team members had heard about ChartIQ, its innovative work, and the types of firms it was supporting. They believed that collaboring with ChartIQ could enable them to impliment the differation they needed. They reached out to the ChartIQ specialists at S&P Global Market Intelligence to learn more.

The Solution

Specialists from ChartIQ discussed how the advanced out-of-the-box templates would enable the product team to present clients with a unique view of the market, with the ability to layer in proprietary data to visualize interactions with market data. ChartIQ serves as a comprehensive infrastructure toolkit, boasting exceptional flexibility and seamless integration facilitated by a complete software development kit (SDK). The SDK comprises comprehensive APIs, ready-to-use production-grade UI templates, sample implementations, optional add-on modules and extensive documentation and support. The offering would let the team:

Key Benefits

Members of the product team were impressed with the capabilities of ChartIQ and thought the company had a shared vision of the future of the trading desktop that would enable both groups to work together over time to continue to enhance the front-end capabilities. The manager of product marketing said, “It is very easy to establish prototypes and experiment with different data models inside the application. We probably could have built a charting application ourselves, but it would have taken us much longer, and it may not have been as sophisticated as ChartIQ’s, nor would it have come with the many benefits.” The team saw that they could easily blend the wealth of their data with the best of currently available charting technology and are now benefiting from having:

• A more comprehensive charting library than what they could have built in-house.
• A vastly improved user experience for their significant number of end users, all done within a six-month period. 
• The ability to easily establish prototypes and experiment with different data models inside the application.
• Customization to add their own aesthetic look and limiting restrictions.
• Flexibility to precisely implement the models and frameworks anticipated for deployment by using ChartIQ’s HTML5 toolkit.
• Excellent support to quickly get the right answers and efficiently address any challenges.
• A partner relationship that supports the alignment of roadmaps.

The manager of product marketing summed things up by saying, "ChartIQ was there with us all the way. We always had someone we could call, rely on to give us the right answers, and be sure of efficiently turning things around. This has been an overwhelmingly very positive experience with ChartIQ.”

ChartIQ provides traders and investors with advanced financial charting and technical analysis tools for data-driven decision-making.  Click here to learn more about the ChartIQ solution.