01 March 2005 Comments

 

Editorial Comment

It would be nice to think that there is some guiding principle behind everything, but in practice, the process of putting together magazines is pretty organic, with plenty of external factors that affect the final outcome.

The fact that there was a scheduled feature on mobile payments and the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes was bringing all the mobile operators together while we were working on the issue suggested that there might be an element of telecoms in the mix, but it has crept up all over the place.

In news, we have Barclays being the latest to switch over to an IP network, though it is still to go the whole hog and integrate voice. In the retail section, there’s a look at how IP will bring a host of new features beyond voice — integrating the CCTV cameras that monitor branches and allowing intelligent applications to process the images. And in the securities section, we find that dealerboards — turrets — are blossoming again on the back of new technologies and a resurgence in voice trading.

Well, who’d have thought it? Not so very long ago, it seemed that the only tangible benefit from VoIP was going to be a further reduction in the cost of offshoring call centres, and replacing hideously expensive dealerboards with PC-based computer integrated telephony systems.

And as we report elsewhere, there is a massive growth in automated algorithmic trading, so a resurgence of the voice dealer is not what you might immediately have thought likely.

After performing a double-take, and thinking some more, there is some sense in this — banks don’t spend money without there being some sense behind it — and it comes down to a very simple fact. The human brain is infinitely better than the most powerful computer at certain processing tasks, and the most efficient way to communicate with another human brain is by speech.

This means that when things get subtle, such as when there is some rapid and dramatic shift in the market, or you are trying to shift an illiquid stock, there is no substitute for the human: watch any good salesperson on the phone and try to imagine a computer doing that kind of negotiation. As is well known in banking, computers say “no”.

Every now and then, technologies come along that appear to offer new ways of doing things, or improvements to old ways. There is something rather satisfying that speech, one of the oldest ways of doing things, is still affecting the way that technology can be deployed, and pleasing that the technology is becoming sufficiently sophisticated to usefully support it.

David Bannister, Editor