Virtual Reality Meets the Retail Trader
Swissquote Bank have embraced the winds of change and launched an application which enables clients to trade in virtual reality.
Users of the technology are immersed in a 360-degree trading environment which includes stocks, major share indices and currency pairs.
The new technology allows traders to access information and make trading decisions, literally, with the blink of an eye.
Users who are Swissquote clients, can also login to their profiles, view the status of their accounts and even execute a trade thanks to eye-tracking technology from Fast Trade.
The eye-tracking ‘Fast Trade’ technology is also expected to be rolled out to other mediums including Apple watches, iphones and Androids, enabling users of those technologies to also use their eyes to make decisions.
The innovative application enables quicker trade execution by “pre-configuring a number of criteria,” such as trade size, for example, and thus enabling a speedy two step ‘click-and-buy’ procedure.
“By default, this amount is set at CHF 5,000. After selecting a stock, two further steps are necessary to complete the trade: clicking on 'buy' and then 'confirm'. Both actions are also executed using the app’s built-in eye-tracking technology,” said a company representative.
At the launch of the app, Paolo Buzzi, CTO at Swissquote stated:
“Being at the forefront of technology is Swissquote’s signature and our new VR Trading application is another illustration of our innovative capacity.
“While it is true that the use of VR helmets is still marginal, building our application allows us to also perfect Swissquote’s existing applications on other devices, therefore accelerating our own technological evolution.
“In this way, the Fast Trade tool, initially developed for VR helmets, will eventually be usable for our Apple Watch application.”
The company was the first Swiss bank to develop an online trading app for mobile devices in 2008.
The two applications are now among the most popular banking apps in Apple's Swiss app store with 228,000 (iPhone) and 90,700 (iPad) downloads. In June 2015, Swissquote was the first bank with an application for the Apple Watch.
