ITS Convergence Develops 'Integrated Dealing Room' Combining Banking and Securities Capital Market Operations
The integrated dealing room solution and service introduced by ITS Convergence have transformed the landscape of financial institutions' dealing rooms. Photo by ITS Convergence
[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Heeyoon] ITS Convergence is an IT company with 21 years of experience providing integrated dealing room solutions and services. A dealing room refers to the space where financial institutions invest and manage their own capital in stocks, derivatives, bonds, and more. For dealers who lead the one-second decisions at the heart of finance, speed is life. Recently, winds of change have been blowing through the dealing room systems that form the foundation of this. The introduction of 'co-location'?placing the capital market departments of banks and securities firms in one place (a data center rental service for companies and public institutions without their own data centers)?has become a signal accelerating the construction of integrated dealing room systems.
The integrated dealing room built by ITS Convergence for KB Kookmin Bank and KB Securities attracted attention as the first integrated model in 16 years. Shin Chunsik, CEO of ITS Convergence, explained, “We visited integrated dealing rooms in financial advanced countries such as Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands to directly observe their cases and then started developing an integrated dealing room model suitable for the domestic environment.”
The integrated dealing room, occupying two floors of the K Tower in Yeouido, is the first space in Korea where a bank, securities, and insurance company are gathered together, featuring a 14-meter curved electronic display at the front that shows market conditions from around the world. Dealers use 6 to 8 monitors, but the main units are not located here; by plugging in an integrated keyboard and entering their ID, they can use any seat as their own desk. However, a Chinese wall (an information exchange blocking device for financial investment companies) that blocks internal information exchange within the company ensures that securities and bank dealers use separate spaces on different floors. The third-floor server room, where the main units are gathered, is also divided by wire mesh between securities and bank servers, which is notable. ITS Convergence invited Swiss experts and conducted installation and inspection over two months to build the integrated system.
CEO Shin, who majored in computer engineering, started his business after acquiring discarded dealing equipment while working at Daewoo Telecom and researching it. While developing the system with three developers by analyzing foreign cases, he began full-scale dealing room operation and maintenance by participating in the introduction of Deutsche Bank’s dealing room in Korea.
All PCs are installed in the server room, and the smart dealing room solution, which allows integrated control of 16 PCs with a single dealer keyboard, has transformed the dealing room environment of existing financial companies. Since founding the company, CEO Shin has defined the most important element in dealing rooms as an uninterrupted system. He emphasized, “We have built a system with no accidents for 20 years,” adding, “If the dealing room stops due to technical or disaster issues, the entire financial system could be paralyzed, so we have also prepared another system to prevent this.”
The BCP (Business Continuity Plan) system prepared for emergency situations in the dealing room caused by technical or disaster issues has recently gained attention amid issues such as call center and workplace closures due to confirmed cases of COVID-19. The strength lies in the DR (Disaster Recovery) center built for data protection, which allows work to continue simply by changing locations. The future adoption of BCP systems by region is expected to become an essential system in line with the post-COVID era.
ITS Convergence recently developed a solution applying dealing room systems to disaster and security control areas, aiming to take on the challenge of one-second decisions for life safety rather than money. CEO Shin explained, “In Europe, about 40% of integrated system applications are in finance and 60% in non-finance, with higher utilization in control centers,” adding, “If integrated systems had been applied to disaster control, real-time situation sharing and communication records would have all been saved as data, potentially preventing accidents like the Sewol ferry disaster.”
ITS Convergence’s next goal is to apply the integrated system to comprehensive control rooms and develop it according to ISO 9001 standards. CEO Shin said, “Applying the integrated dealing room system to comprehensive control rooms can automate systems that usually respond within one minute to respond within 45 seconds,” and added, “We will strive to ensure that the integrated system is used as a tool to secure the golden time that protects life safety beyond just money.”
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