The 2019 League of Legends World Championship Series drew a peak viewership of 3.9 million people. The Fortnite World Cup Finals pulled in a peak of 2.3 million. While those numbers are dwarfed by football’s Super Bowl or soccer’s Champions League Final, the popularity of e-sports is growing exponentially, as is investment in the field.

A recent Washington Post article noted that between 2010 and 2020, “annual game industry revenue grew from $78 billion to $137 billion—more than either Hollywood or the American music industry,” and that “as Netflix put it in its fourth quarter 2018 letter to shareholders, ‘We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO,’” referring to the popular online video game and the US premium television network that aired Game of Thrones.

As more money has entered the space, video game makers have used that investment to improve their products. First, there’s the player experience. The gaming industry has been at the bleeding edge when it comes to visualization, texture, and resolution techniques for maps and game play. The ability to track movements of numerous players in real-time has also improved. Additionally, the viewer experience has been vastly enhanced as the likes of League of Legends, Fortnite, Counter-Strike, and Overwatch have worked diligently to make it easier to reconstruct a match, provide deeper pre- and post-match statistics and charts, show where on a map a particular player gets most of their kills, and how players compare to their peers.

Visualization, mapping, charting, real-time statistics, pre- and post-match statistics—sound familiar? As more money has funneled into the world of e-sports, the gaming industry has poured that investment back into the player and user experience, and capital markets firms are taking notice.

Consider this: What attributes make for an elite gamer? Hand–eye coordination and stamina—their mechanics—are certainly vital, but they also need to take in an array of inputs, distill that information, and make rapid-fire decisions. They need to be able to keep calm—what’s known as having “good mental”—and they need to be efficient in chaotic environments. Many—if not all—of those traits are also found in elite traders.

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

David Reilly, Bank of America

Comparing a kid playing Nintendo Switch to a professional e-sports gamer is like comparing a kid looking at stocks in a newspaper to the head of equities trading at a bulge-bracket firm. Gamers and traders both work in stressful, competitive, and volatile environments. And the best of these professionals can find patterns where others cannot, says Sanjna Parasrampuria, head of applied innovation at Refinitiv Labs in Asia.

“Gamers typically spend hours trying to figure out the new stuff in the game, or the loophole in the game to leverage, and that links back to how traders try to think outside the box to find a loophole, or where the alpha might lie, for example,” she says.

According to numerous scientific studies, those who play video games tend to have better memory, attention, and visuospatial skills—the ability to represent, analyze, and mentally manipulate objects. Positive Effects of Videogame Use on Visuospatial Competencies: The Impact of Visualization Style in Preadolescents and Adolescents published in 2019 by Luca Milani, Serena Grumi, and Paola Di Blasio is a good summary of this phenomenon.

While video games and the world of institutional finance haven’t yet collided in a meaningful way, some in the capital markets are looking to tap into aspects of the gaming world, specifically around visualization techniques. However, integrating the two worlds may not come easily, depending on how banks want to use these gaming advancements.

A Different Game

One video game company making inroads into finance is Epic Games, the creator of the massively popular online game Fortnite, which runs on the Unreal Engine, a cutting-edge gaming engine written in C++.

Craig Laliberte, who oversees Unreal Engine business development at Epic Games, tells WatersTechnology that the company is using the engine to provide a platform for financial institutions—among other industries—to prototype new methods of visualizing their data in immersive environments.

“The open architecture and Blueprint Visual Scripting (the gameplay scripting system inside the Unreal Engine) are key to giving them an out-of-the-box platform to build upon, without the need to write applications from the ground up,” he explains.

Visualizing this simulated data, and then using it as a resource to train AI models, could be an exciting new approach for the banking sector. Teams no longer have to settle for simple charts and graphs; instead, now they have the ability to map data with creative and comprehensive 3D visualizations. 

Craig Laliberte, Epic Games

Laliberte says his team is looking to build on the way it incorporates real-world inputs for other industries, and banking is an obvious area of expansion. “Visualizing this simulated data, and then using it as a resource to train artificial intelligence models, could be an exciting new approach for the banking sector,” he says.

Game engines provide the ability to visualize big data in new ways, freeing companies to think outside of the box. “Teams no longer have to settle for simple charts and graphs; instead, now they have the ability to map data with creative and comprehensive 3D visualizations,” he says.

Immersive environments allow users to process information spatially, which is how humans naturally digest data in the real world. He says immersive environments make for a quicker, more collaborative way of learning and decision-making than what can be achieved through two-dimensional screens and linear methods alone.

While gaming offers the ability to crunch data and visualize actionable information quickly and easily, this doesn’t mean that development stops there. Epic’s Unreal Engine enterprise team is continuing to add new features to support non-game initiatives, Laliberte says. It is working on adding Python scripting, as well as new visual data prep, which, he says, will provide users with more functionality.

‘Truly Immersive’

Bank of America (BofA) is one of those companies currently experimenting with the Unreal Engine for trading. BofA turned to a video game company because of its ability to render information in real time, according to David Reilly, chief information officer at the BofA’s global banking and markets group.

“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,” he said, while speaking at last year’s Waters USA conference on December 3. 

The bank is working on a prototype using the Unreal Engine that could be applied to the trading floor.

Reilly said the trading world is due for a shake-up, and the way traders consume information needs to change. “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,” he said.

Although the prototype is still a work in progress, in theory, the platform could show each trading desk on a single screen. So, for example, the bank is looking to create a three-dimensional bar that pops up in red to show when a trader is taking on a significant amount of risk. This could help the trade manager 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. 

The bank aims to have a prototype rolled out this year, though it declined to add further comment for this story.

However, beyond incorporating a three-dimensional view of trading information, Reilly foresees a product that also includes other senses beyond sight. For example, there could be a tone that speeds up to mimic an accelerated heart rate, or an actual pulsating sensation delivered through a chair, keyboard, or wearable. After all, while video games are primarily visual, there are strong audio and tactile components that add to the experience and convey information.

“What are the different ways for a trader to absorb information? We don’t think it’s just going to be visual. We think there will be an audio supplement to it as well,” Reilly said. “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 how 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 in Tokyo.”

Story continues after the BOX.

The Net Effect

One of the big reasons why firms have been looking at new data visualization techniques is because there’s simply more data available. The explosion of the alternative data market, when combined with market and reference data, can create an overwhelming firehose of information that traders need to distill quickly.

John Lin, CEO of proprietary trading firm Grasshopper, believes the next wave of gamification technology will work off of data and be very potent. “We have too much data,” he says. “Turning data into information is the key catalyst.”

Traders actually sitting at a desk looking at a 2D screen will, to some extent, fade away, Lin believes. However, there are steps where human interaction is useful, so the “experience,” he says, becomes more about representing mission-critical data into information that is quickly actionable by a human, and that could eventually center around 3D information consumption, even if that’s still a long way off.

Changing the way traders consume information, and trying to make the trading environment more effective and efficient, has been talked about for decades. Indeed, as traders deal with larger, more diverse datasets, which are increasingly provided in unstructured formats, it poses an important question: Is there a need for another way to process and display information? 

The fact that the trader workspace is so busy has been talked about for the past two decades, notes Joel Hurewitz, head of sales for Asia-Pacific at Instinet, Nomura’s Asia-Pacific equities execution business.

“They’ve got bells and whistles going off all day. Putting more bells and whistles in—that gives the traders more information, but could it not be more data overload, and in real-time? Traders have enough to worry about. Is adding more going to ultimately make things easier, or harder for them?” he asks. “One of the problems that we and every other broker struggle with is the number of alerts. You may set up alerts to show orders are reaching this or that, but at the end of the day, you get so many alerts you ignore them, or you miss them. The question I would ask is whether adding more alerts will be a net positive or a net negative.”

To Patrick Mohr, executive director at Instinet, the term “gaming technology” could suggest somebody who is adrenaline-driven and constantly reacting to little things popping up on the screen all day long. Of course, traders need real-time information. The best systems will notify traders of big moves, potential moves at a certain probability, and the success rate of the model at predicting outcomes on trades it has not seen previously. According to Mohr, if the term can be expanded to include these perspectives—which essentially represent a more data science-driven approach to trading—then it can be very powerful.

For this reason, Instinet has placed a lot of focus on trying to find patterns across thousands of orders. This is so that, when talking to clients, it can advise them on how to trade, or how to use their algos more effectively.

Mohr’s offering pays attention to the parameter settings that clients are exposed to. He tries to help clients understand if they’re too aggressive, or passive, or whether they should be giving the algo more breadth to maneuver. Rather than incorporating new gamification techniques, Instinet would prefer to incorporate more traditional algorithmic models to help drive alerts.

To do this, the firm uses a decision-tree model to help parse trading data into clusters so it can help clients see what is impacting performance. Every order is screened before Instinet trades it, and the team looks for potential problems with the way clients are using the algos.

“These are all orders that haven’t been executed yet. For example, say it’s a Japan VWAP order that’s 5% of bid and volume: We have a decision tree to know the parameters and the algo affecting performance,” Mohr says. “We have a statistical measure of how well that tree has explained behavior historically. Then, we summarize all of that information for every single order before it’s been executed. That goes to our sales coverage team. It’s up to them, then, whether or not they want to call our clients and advise that they should change the way they’re using the algo.”

Technically, the decision tree could run in real time, but the danger is that there’s already so much noise in the trading data. “If you get into shorter and shorter periods, you’re just yanking people around with stuff that is just like the flavor of the last five minutes,” he says.

Still, Mohr is not totally closed off to the idea of gamer tech seeping into the capital markets; it’s just a question of effectiveness. If there were a platform that consolidated everything and presented information that a trader wants to see in a customized way, that could be valuable, he says.

“Everyone’s unique and some people like lights, some people like bells, some people like text messages, or reminders, or emails, or whatever. There’s probably some value there,” Mohr says. “Just like trying to consolidate all of the different screens that the traders are exposed to—I would agree with that.”

A Different Reality

It’s also impossible to talk about gamer tech and the capital markets without touching on the use of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) wearables. The challenge the industry still faces is trying to hook up these flashy new tools to their more traditional trading systems, from order and execution management systems, to portfolio management systems and analytics platforms.

Refinitiv’s Sanjna says it is one thing to have, for example, 30 years of data, to put it in a sample, run different scenarios on it, and then show the data points coming in and out using advanced tech, but can that really be done in real-time? If a trader still needs to go back to their traditional desktop and place the trade there, that defeats the purpose of incorporating new tools. “All [of] that is not yet stitched in,” Sanjna says. “There’s a lot of interest, certainly.”

Again, these efforts are not necessarily new. Refinitiv has also tried its hand at creating trader immersion within its Eikon platform. Several years ago, for instance, the company experimented with the HoloLens—Microsoft’s AR headset—to see how data on Eikon could be displayed.

Sanjna says this was done to help Refinitiv experiment with new data visualization techniques, but, in the end, it did not lead to a revolution in the trader experience.

“Is that something which has come to life in the market? I think we’re very far away, from an industry maturity standpoint, in terms of how our back-end systems can actually support these kinds of front-end technologies,” she says.

Similarly, Bloomberg was developing a VR wearable headset that could, in theory, replace traders’ workstations and cut back on the need for multiple screens. Back in 2014, it was working with Facebook’s Oculus unit. Though Bloomberg has yet to produce anything formal, WatersTechnology has seen first-hand a demo of this wearable workstation. While it’s currently being used only for marketing purposes, the data and tech giant is still experimenting with the technology.

Mihir Shah, senior director of digital at technology consultancy and services firm Synechron, notes that as the gaming industry has evolved over the decades, from stick-based games to wireless remote controls, to AR and VR visualizations, those advancements will continue to bleed into other industries. “In the current era, AR and VR have great potential for creating some emerging and engaging experiences for trading and other processes across the bank,” Shah says.

While it’s important and useful for the industry to keep on working with new visualization techniques, the big question, according to Refinitiv’s Sanjna, is how much of this can truly be stitched into existing workflows?

“It’s ensuring this doesn’t become like a separate thing that I’m going into, checking out, and then I have to go back in to my original workflow to actually execute,” she says. “So [there are] a lot of steps to take in order to change the experience of how we have traditionally consumed data in capital markets.”   

Seeing the Data

It can’t be said enough: It’s still early days when it comes to incorporating these new gamification techniques into the trading ecosystem. WatersTechnology reached out to a dozen banks to see if anyone else was exploring gaming technology for data visualization—on background, some said they were not, while others said they were exploring the idea, but weren’t ready to discuss those efforts publicly.

And it’s also notable that BofA is not looking to roll out a fully functioning platform this year; rather, it is merely hoping to create a prototype in 2020, according to Reilly. At the start of this year, there were only two technologists working on the project, and they hadn’t written a single line of code. “It’s all in configuration,” he said.

Yet Reilly said these early efforts would serve as the foundation for future innovation.

“It’s not an obvious thing for us maybe to have done, but it holds real, real promise,” he said. “And it’s that whole point of immediacy and real-time—that’s what we’ve learned from the experience.”