Patent Application
20130268576
This invention relates generally to a method and apparatus for providing customized information from a content provider to a plurality of recipients.
In the fast moving world of commerce such as the financial markets, there is a need to address the information overload problem. Consumers need to be able to easily select the content they wish to see and how they want to see it. The providers of content need to be able to ensure that they are correctly targeting the right audience to maximize the likelihood of generating business. Finance is one such example of this where, currently, participants in the financial markets resort to using traditional communication media like email, email-style systems and instant messaging to convey pricing information. These types of systems provide little transparency for the content providers, an inability to easily cater to different categories of clients, poor control for recipients of this information, often resulting in an overwhelming and inefficient experience.
For example, the institutional financial markets are broadly broken down into two distinct types of market players: (1) providers of financial data, content and opinion, much of which is proprietary (e.g., over-the-counter pricing); and (2) consumers of this content. Examples of the providers of this type of content include institutional financial firms such as banks, broker-dealers or inter-dealer brokers (i.e., the “sell side”). An example of this type of content includes over-the-counter pricing for instruments such as fixed income securities or structured products whose value is calculated by the providers (as opposed to something that is priced on an exchange which matches buyers and sellers). An example of the type of consumer for this information include investment management firms who manage funds for the purpose of increasing their value for the benefit of investors and companies managing their own funds such as insurance companies (i.e., the “buy side”). Consumers of this information can also include sell side participants such as sales people in banks who may re-distribute content provided by traders to their clients and inter-dealer brokers who match buyers and sellers.
Conventionally, providers use traditional communications mechanisms, as discussed above, and send content information to groups of consumers, either by way of large mailing list groups or custom mailing lists. Furthermore, it is not readily possible for consumers to easily tailor the types of content information to be received or viewed.
In view of the foregoing, it is desirable to provide a better method and apparatus for communicating information between providers and consumers.
A computer-implemented method and system for providing customized information from a content provider to a plurality of recipients. A content provider first ranks, via a content provider interface provided via a first computer server, a selected portion of the recipients into at least two separate tiers (groupings) of recipients based upon a predetermined criteria. The content provider, generates, at the first computer server and via the content provider interface, customized information for transmission to the recipients. The content provider also generates, at the first computer server and via the content provider interface, associated information related to the customized information for each separate tier. Finally, the customized information and the respective associated information is transmitted to each tier of recipients.
Preferably, the customized information comprises information identifying particular financial instruments offered for sale. In addition, the associated information comprises pricing information for the particular financial instruments offered for sale. Further, the predetermined criteria may, in an embodiment, comprise a rating based upon past purchases by each customer. In one embodiment, the predetermined criteria comprises a credit rating of each customer. In an alternative embodiment, each customer provides information prior to receiving any customized information and wherein the ranking step is also based upon the information provided by each customer.
The computer-implemented method and system also allows the content provider to identify one or more particular recipients not included with any of the tiers of recipients to be associated with a respective one of the tiers of recipients, and for each identified one or more particular recipients, the customized information and the respective associated information for the associated one of the tiers of recipients is transmitted to the identified one or more particular recipients.
In an additional variation to the preferred embodiment, the computer-implemented method and system provides customized information from a plurality of content providers to a plurality of recipients. In this embodiment, each of the plurality of content providers first ranks, in a first computer server, a selected portion of the recipients associated with that content provider into at least two separate tiers of recipients based upon a predetermined criteria. Each content provider then generates, at the first computer server and via an associated content provider interface, customized information for transmission to the recipients and also generates associated information related to the customized information for each separate tier. Finally, the customized information and the respective associated information for each content provider is transmitted to each tier of associated recipients.
The following detailed description, given by way of example and not intended to limit the present invention solely thereto, will best be understood in conjunction with the accompanying drawings in which:
The present invention provides a method and apparatus for linking content providers and consumers by matching the interests of consumers of financial data and content (buy side) and the providers of such financial data and content (sell side). In the context of the present invention, a “user” refers to a member of the product target customer audience i.e., a user may refer to both recipients and providers, depending on the flow of content.
With the method and apparatus of the present invention, a content recipient (user) may define the type of information to be received, when this information is to be delivered and where such information should be delivered. In addition, the present invention provides a content provider with the ability to provide pricing information (and other content) to targeted consumers without risk of that information being delivered to unintended audiences. Content may be streamed to consumers (users) in real time. Consumers are presented with functionality that allows them to search for feeds of content which matches their interests (see
In summary, according to an embodiment the present invention a publisher 201 publishes content by way of three separate steps: (1) creating a portfolio basket (i.e., a list of securities or other financial products to be offered for sale); (2) provide a list of tags to the portfolio basket; and (3) select the particular clients that will receive the content (here the tagged portfolio basket) by creating a distribution list associated with this content. The present invention then automatically selects the correct feed to place this content on based on tags and the distribution list associated with the basket. In this summary, the portfolio basket is the customized information that is distributed. The present invention provides a mechanism for providing any type of information to the recipients identified on the distribution list. For the purposes of this invention, “customized information” is broadly defined to mean any type of information of any sort that is selected for distribution.
From a receiving perspective—Recipient 3123 in
Search index layer 354 is provided on top of the data stores 351, 352 in order to provide quick access to data. The feed matching application 353 determines what content gets delivered from which providers to which subscribers and applies privileging information to the content. The application server 355 takes care of all business logic and feeds the output to the model view controller server 358. An additional alert server 357 is also part of the system to push out real-time alerts to subscribers via the viewbox interface on the client desktops 359, as discussed below.
Feeds are maintained by the providers of content who use it for marketing purposes. When a potential consumer is interested in the content, the potential customer requests a subscription. If approved, content published to consumers will become available in this new customer's incoming feed. A customer may unsubscribe at any time. Each feed represents content of a particular nature including but not limited to financial instruments/asset types (e.g., corporate bonds, foreign exchange). Users/customers (recipients) are able to search by instrument, asset type, by attributes of that asset class or a combination of these and other elements by searching via a keyword or keywords in the search field above and viewing results 407 detailed in screen 400 or they can click on the options button 408 where one option will be to search for content. Upon finding a feed of interest, users may request a subscription, which request is then sent to the content provider for approval. Feed recommendations are made to end users based on current feed subscriptions, readership and usage patterns.
Some feeds may consist of an open broadcast of information which allow the content providers to advertise content to the consumers. The content providers have assigned administrators for each feed who receive all incoming subscription requests and approve/deny access for clients (consumers) and potential clients accordingly.
As discussed above, based on the entered search terms, users are also able to see matching but currently unsubscribed feeds. Upon selecting an unsubscribed feed, the user is presented with an information screen 500 shown in
Providers of content are also able to manage how their content is distributed in the preferred embodiment of the present invention. The provider interface 600 is shown in
Users use the response box 1200 shown in
In order to manage the large amounts of content which consumers are entitled to view, a key element of the present invention is the ability to create filters to display content in a user defined manner in the ViewBox 1102. In particular, a user may filter the data by attributes/characteristics of thereof and display it in a manner that best befits the workflow of that user. For example, a consumer may have five subscription feeds for CDS pricing, but may choose to create two views for the incoming CDS pricing based on currency (e.g., EUR and USD denominated instruments). Additionally, a consumer can create filters of attributes or characteristics which ‘listen’ for content being offered that matches the set criteria. An example would be a money manager who is interested in new corporate bond issues with a coupon between 1% and 4%, 5 year maturity in the banking sector with an investment grade credit rating. The consumer can create a filter using the present invention which displays matching securities offered by content providers that are available from both content providers that have authorized them and from other content providers who are advertising such bonds via open feeds.
Using the present invention, content providers may publish content on predefined feeds. These feeds will often be defined around groups of individuals (e.g., desks) that provide specific pricing and other related services to their customers. Content published into feeds may have characteristic tags that are manually or automatically assigned to such content. These tags represent various characteristics on which recipients may filter (as detailed above).
An important differentiating feature of the present invention is the ability to publish different prices to subscribers of the same feed. The difference in content including, but not limited to, pricing is determined by the tiers that are set by publishers of content. For example, a content provider publishes to a CDS price feed, but the prices differ based on the different tiers which reflect how aggressive the broadcaster wishes to be about pricing. Providers determine which tier a recipient falls into based on various characteristics, including but not limited to credit profile, standing with the company, size of company or other rationale based on the relationship between the two parties. For example, a content provider may have a feed for CDS pricing with three tiers, one for internal distribution (e.g., from traders to sales people), one for valued customers who demand very competitive pricing and another for everyone else.
In order to ensure that publishers are catering to the needs of their customers, content publishers using the present invention are able to aggregate usage, subscription and readership data. For example, an individual publisher is able to see for an individual consumer, feed or tier perspective how many users are reading content distributed to them and how many individuals have subscribed or unsubscribed to a feed. This data can also be aggregated on a more macro basis which allows evaluation on a desk, department or firm wide basis.
Content providers as well as consumers have access to full contact management functionality that allows them to manage (add/remove) their contacts, create tiers, export and share contacts and outsource the administration of all of the above to other users or administrators. The intention is to allow integration with CRM systems and other systems which aggregate trading activity. Specific analytics are built to reconcile trading activity to content received, read etc. on both an individual recipient, firm and tier basis.
While the present invention has been particularly shown and described with reference to the preferred embodiments and various aspects thereof, it will be appreciated by those of ordinary skill in the art that various changes and modifications may be made without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention. It is intended that the appended claims be interpreted as including the embodiments described herein, the alternatives mentioned above, and all equivalents thereto.
