The three-word inspirational directive is seared onto the consciousness of every FCAT associate.
In FCAT, we have wide latitude to experiment with ideas and technologies that may impact the future of financial services. To that end, associates scan the horizon for signals that show where our technologies and culture are headed. Then we try the best ones, sometimes collaborating with fintechs and startups and always iterating, working to build the best tools and services for each use case. Finally, when appropriate, we scale and bring those projects to the larger enterprise and eventually the market.
Teams working in FCAT often focus on only one or two areas of the three-pronged model. This is certainly true of the Spatial Computing and Emerging Tech incubators, which research and experiment with bleeding-edge tech. The Emerging Tech team started almost 10 years ago, with a mission to delve into worlds that included extended realities, encryption, and neural networks. The Spatial Computing team began in the last couple of years, as this technology became more ubiquitous.
Both teams almost exclusively operate within the scan/try realms, quickly developing proofs of concept to test the tech, before moving on to the next new thing. Proofs of concept (POCs) in recent years have focused on extended realities, touchless interactions, holograms, avatars, computer vision, and spatial analytics. Most of their experiments are just that — a quick bit of learning that may or may not come back around to assist a more concrete project in the future.
“We’ve always had this mantra of rapid iteration and failing fast,” says Jamie Barras, Head of the Spatial Computing and Emerging Tech incubators. “Often we are ahead of the enterprise, and our work is used to demonstrate the possibilities or inspire leaders to think about how these technologies might be used to add value.”
A POC that lasts 12 weeks is a very long project in this world, and those are very rare. Most might require just a few weeks of work.
So, when an extraordinary opportunity came along — to collaborate with a client to build the world’s first spatial trading app — they jumped at the chance, even though it required a rethinking of their day-to-day.
“We had to build new muscles. We shifted from incubating ideas,” Jamie says, “to building for production.”
The Plynk mobile app is designed for people who are looking to grow their investing knowledge. Matthew Savage, Plynk’s Product Manager, has years of experience building digital tools in the financial services sector. But prior to starting this project, Matthew and his team had never worked with extended realities. Jamie’s teams had never built a mobile trading app. For what would become Plynk Spatial, the sides would need to meld their expertise.
“When you’re in the investing space, you can easily lock into what you’ve grown to know,” Matthew says. “In building Plynk Spatial, it was important for me to forget everything I knew about investing technologies and just go in and learn from Jamie’s teams. They had so much experience.”
Years prior, Jamie’s teams had built a 2D gesture-recognition system for calling up stock data. Users could use gesture control to move information on a giant flat screen. Since there are no hand controllers with the Apple Vision Pro, users depend on the headset’s eye-tracking and gesture-recognition features to navigate through the 360-degree spatial experience. Upscaling the teams’ previous work was one of the first steps in bringing Plynk Spatial to life.
In the Apple Vision Pro, users are surrounded by data and can manipulate vast amounts of information with a swipe of the hand or pinch of the fingers.
“It almost feels like a superhero moment because you have this visual data at your fingertips,” Jamie says. “It helps you make a decision more quickly, rather than having to navigate through multiple webpages with a 2D interface.”
While Jamie’s teams worked on bringing their expertise to the table, so did Matthew. And while he was open to the possibilities created by working on an app for the Apple Vision Pro, he couldn’t truly forget what he learned about building investing apps. Because every core feature on the Plynk mobile app needed to be included in the spatial app.
“When you’re working with spatial computing, the experience obviously needs to be flashy and cool, but it also has to be effective in getting the job done for the user,” Matthew says. ”So it was really about mixing the spectacular nature of extended reality with the useful necessity of trading features.”
Users can trade stocks and funds in the app. There is also a heat map with color-coded 3D data visualizations to help users make key trading decisions, and traders can filter the data in a number of ways.
To get it done, the teams locked in quickly — Matthew’s team with its back-end domain expertise and Jamie’s with their spatial know-how. Regular meetings kept the work flowing, and once they started developing with visionOS, Apple’s native operating system for the Vision Pro, they completed the app in six months.
To celebrate its introduction in the app store, Matthew flew from New Jersey to join Jamie’s group in North Carolina to conduct the first official trade.
“It was a very proud moment, knowing that as a team we could dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s and deploy the app into production,” Jamie says. “We built those muscles very quickly and added huge value to the Plynk ecosystem.”
But the work won’t stop there. The teams are already focused on the next hardware destined to create new opportunities: smart glasses.
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