For a precious few months—say mid-2016 on into 2017—the idea of virtual reality (VR) and its sibling augmented reality (AR) becoming an actual reality on Wall Street were starting to take shape. Facebook had released the Oculus Rift VR headset. Microsoft released its mixed reality HoloLens. After fits and starts, Google Glass, an AR wearable device, hit the market. And who could forget the Pokémon Go craze in the summer of 2016?

Around that time, Citi and Fidelity Investments started to explore the possibility of AR on the trading floor, as did BNP Paribas and Wells Fargo, to some degree or another. Nasdaq worked with students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to integrate voice commands with an AR workflow to pull up data during a meeting and enhance working groups. Order management system (OMS) provider FlexTrade started to dabble in AR. Goldman Sachs put out an equity research report on AR/VR.

And then things started to quiet down. Those videogame headsets that were selling off the shelves during the holiday seasons of 2016 and ’17, started to collect dust. When it comes to the trading floor, the conversation has moved away from AR/VR and toward gamer tech.

At Waters USA in December 2019, David Reilly, chief information officer for Bank of America’s Global Banking & Markets group, said that the trader experience was on the cusp of a massive overhaul, but he was talking about gamer tech for data visualization and how the bank is using the Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. AR/VR was not part of that initial push.

WatersTechnology called around to see whether others were interested in or naysayers of such experiments, but no one took the bait.

The First Seeds

If a remote workforce is to be a lingering side effect of Covid-19, one could see a scenario where virtual assistance is valuable. Beyond the worlds of video games and movies, virtual and augmented reality devices have been used in other industries and have proven useful for training and educational purposes.

Yet on Wall Street, up to this point it’s mainly been theories and low-level proofs-of-concept. There was a time, though, when the concept was growing roots. Back in 2016, Citi put a video up on YouTube called “The Trading Floor of the Future: Augmented Reality Proof Case”.

From the presentation: “The Holographic Workstation increases efficiency by using the HoloLens platform to create 3D holograms of real-time financial data. A three-tiered system of dynamically updated and interactive information enables traders to view, process, and interact with large amounts of abstract data in a combined 3D and 2D environment. The physical workstation integrates tablet screen space, 3D holographic docking pace, keyboard, mouse, gaze, gesture, voice input, and existing Citi devices and workflows.”

After the video was released, Stuart Riley, then global head of markets and securities services technology and operations at Citi, told WatersTechnology that traders’ desktops are too complicated to expect firms to duplicate all of their applications for a digital environment, which would be required for a true VR experience. Thus, the bank set its sights on AR.

“If you move into an augmented reality, you can pull the bits that benefit from 3D visualization and you can leave the pieces that maybe don’t or you haven’t got the money or time to reengineer that are in the natural environment, and essentially just have the two side by side and actually develop the platform such that they can interoperate,” Riley says. “I think it’s far more viable that you would go down an augmented reality-type solution when you’ve got someone sitting at a desktop or working an environment that’s already got a complex set of workflows around than trying to move them into a pure virtual space.”

But it was all theoretical. In 2018, Adam Schouela, Fidelity Labs’ head of emerging technologies, talked with WatersTechnology about the firm’s proofs-of-concept, including something called Cora, which was created in conjunction with Amazon Sumerian, which strove to marry voice technology with the 360-degree blank canvas of VR.

“Within VR we have four main use-cases that we spin out—data visualization, that’s the vein Cora is in; customer education to help them understand more complex financial concepts; employee training, like our empathy training module for our contact center associates; and collaboration to see how might this experience be better than a voice or video call,” he says. “We have real experiments to try out to see where this technology is better than the ones we’re using today.”

Everyone Together While Apart

It should be noted that during those aforementioned interviews, the executives made clear that they did not expect these PoCs to go into mainstream production in the near future. It was more about preparing for the future.

“We want to be ready and develop applications for when these form factors take off,” Schouela said.

As capital markets firms try to understand what the long-tail trends of the coronavirus pandemic will be, it’s clear that collaboration tools are going to take on greater importance. There was a time when AR/VR was gaining steam, but that hype, or hope, or whatever you want to call it, has died down.

An executive at a venture capital fund says that there are two ways for AR and VR to take off specifically for trading purposes, but it won’t start in trading: First is if the major collaboration tools providers—Microsoft Teams, Symphony, or Zoom—make that investment, or, second, if retail banks and brokerages crack that nut first.

Quite frankly, whatever the “new normal” world will look like post-Covid, for institutional trading firms there will be more pressing areas that will require attention, and experimental tech is likely to take a hit.

Think I’m wrong? Let me know: anthony.malakian@infopro-digital.com.