If you’re to believe David Reilly, the trader experience might be on the cusp of a massive overhaul.

Today’s trader workstation consists of anywhere from two to more than a dozen screens, each one flashing with up-to-date information that helps inform a trader as to their next move. The information is delivered in two-dimensional form, but what if a trader could visualize all of that data in 3D?

Reilly, chief information officer for Bank of America’s Global Banking & Markets group, believes the traditional trading terminals that the markets have grown accustomed to over the last three decades are due for a shakeup. While delivering the opening fireside chat at this year’s Waters USA conference in Manhattan, he said the bank is currently partnering with a gaming company to improve its data visualization capabilities. While he used the trading floor as an example, he said this technology could be applicable to any number of business processes at a bank or asset manager.

A two-dimensional rendering of what’s happening on your trading floor—we don’t think, in time, that is how it’s going to work.

David Reilly

As part of Bank of America’s digitization efforts, it looked at all data across the company, from historical data to proprietary information to market data. “The challenge is, how do I draw insight from all of that information? How do I turn that information and data into business insights for my internal clients and, ultimately, external customers?” Reilly said. “And what we see becoming a problem is, how do I absorb all of that information [as more data is made available to users]? How do I go from a two-dimensional way of absorbing information …generally [with] flashing cells of a certain color? That’s not going to work for us in the future.”

On a trading floor, foreign exchange is traded at one bank of desks, government bonds at another, munis at another, and so on. Is there a better way to help a manager understand across the floor (or even across geographies) who is, say, taking too much—or not enough—risk? Enter video game technology.

“A two-dimensional rendering of what’s happening on your trading floor—we don’t think, in time, that is how it’s going to work,” Reilly said. “What we noticed with the gaming companies was that they render information in real time. And they do that over a public network through the internet, into people’s homes, and there’s no latency—there’s no lag. And it’s immersive—it’s truly immersive.”

To experiment, Bank of America is incorporating the Unreal Engine, a cutting-edge gaming engine written in C++, to see how it could be applied to the trading floor. While it’s still very early days for the project, in theory, the platform could show each trading desk on one screen where, say, a three-dimensional bar pops up red to indicate that a trader is taking on a significant amount of risk. This would help the trade manager to decide whether to step in or not.

“So now we can present the information to you in a way where quickly you can say, that’s pretty much what I would have expected, or no it isn’t, I need to go check that out,” Reilly said. “Moreover, that information can be presented to compliance in real time, to risk, to audit, and—maybe one day—to the regulators so that everybody sees the same information. And we think that’s going to extend to all of our businesses.”

Beyond Visual

The project is still in development, but Reilly said the bank hopes to have a prototype rolled out in 2020. Beyond three-dimensional representation, Reilly envisions a product that also incorporates audio, such as a tone that speeds up to mimic an accelerated heart rate. Video games are primarily visual, but there is also an audio component. For some games, the user speaks commands, or the controller will vibrate to enhance the experience. 

What are the different ways for a trader to absorb information? We don’t think it is just going to be visual.

David Reilly

“What are the different ways for a trader to absorb information? We don’t think it is just going to be visual,” he said. “We think there will be an audio supplement to it as well. All of that is coming from the experience we’ve had with the gaming companies. It’s very early days, but the great thing about it is when you present that to someone, right away they know how to interpret the information. There’s no training. You don’t have to explain how to do it. You don’t have to explain how the spreadsheet works, or the terminal works. It’s immediately immersive, and the conversation we start to have is what works in terms of you—the individual—how do you want to consume that information? And that might be different from your colleague in London or your colleague in Tokyo.”

Reilly adds that the two technologists working on the project “haven’t written a single line of code—it’s all in configuration,” meaning that the system is already programmed to be flexible, so it doesn’t require custom programming for each iteration. “It’s not an obvious thing for us maybe to have done, but it holds real, real promise. And it’s that whole point of immediacy and real-time—that’s what we’ve learned from the experience.”