RBS Readies BlackBerry PlayBook App

Royal Bank of Scotland's global banking and markets division recently announced that it will offer fixed-income, commodity and currency (FICC) research and strategy news via BlackBerry's PlayBook tablet. Ron Karpovich, global head of FICC product management at the bank, spoke to Sell-Side Technology about the place of tablet technology in the financial services sector.

In a recent survey conducted by RBS, the bank found that 72 percent of respondents use mobile devices—including smartphones and tablets—to access information on the go, and nearly 60 percent of them expect their use to grow over the next six months.

"We have significant interaction with our customers when they are logged into our systems at their desks, but out of hours, we are getting plenty of phone calls from customers wanting to do deals, and needing information about the market," explains Karpovich.

Having already built an application delivering FICC research and strategy news for the Apple iPad, RBS redeveloped the application for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet—which is due for release in the US on April 19—and will be looking at developing for the Android operating environment later this year.

"The BlackBerry tends to be the prevailing mobile device among the business community because of its security," says Karpovich. "And as the PlayBook is designed to pair with BlackBerry handsets, we believe a large number of our target customers will be given these by their companies after the launch later this month."

According to Karpovich, the application has not been designed to translate everything on the desktop to a mobile device, but will be geared toward people who are away from their desks, and who need updated market information.

"At the moment, there is a limit with the tablets about how much functionality you can run off them. And that's before you consider the poor data download speeds and the patchy connectivity to the internet associated with traveling to work," he says.

However, as customers begin to get comfortable using the devices, Karpovich is optimistic about extending their scope to out-of-hours trading. For example, if there is overnight natural disaster, a trader could put in an order to cover their position. “But it is not about sitting on my couch and trading non-stop," he adds. "At least not yet."

The FICC research and strategy application will be available to customers as of April 19.