IPC Systems has a more than five-decade history as a fintech company that provides connectivity, security and trading solutions for capital markets participants.

Traders Magazine caught up with Kurt Adams, IPC CEO since June 2024, to learn more about the state of the company, the industry landscape, and the vision for next year and beyond.

Briefly discuss your career journey?

My career path has mostly been in fintech around payments. There I saw the evolution of interoperability and the scale of these payments businesses. It’s something that I’ve noticed coming into this opportunity at IPC. In both industries, there’s a network of buyers and sellers. There’s also data and capital that’s moving through this network. The goal is to add speed and scale to execution in industries that are highly regulated and compliant. So while IPC is in a different market than what I’ve been part of historically, there are a lot of parallels and it is very familiar.

What have been ‘first impressions’ in your first 18 months at IPC?

My first impression is the lack of transformation and lack of interoperability in this space. I’ve sat on trading desks and saw traders, with multiple systems and multiple means of communication, doing the same things three, four, five times in a row, 85 or 100 times a day. It’s crazy.

And the other thing that struck me was that IPC has been around for 55 years, it has physical real estate that sits on most of these desks globally, and it has the software platform that powers a global network of over 100,000 users. But it’s still often perceived as a turret company–as a hardware company. The way IPC was positioned was not
recognizing the massive value in the software and the network. My goal is to unlock that value.

What have been 2025 highlights for IPC?

2025 was all about moving the legacy business into the cloud. We’ve invested in the company.

When I first arrived there was some feedback that clients were resistant about the cloud. But after meeting with some of our largest global clients, I learned that wasn’t the case at all. It was just a matter of what is the best way to move to the cloud, and what they need from IPC as a partner to help them in that journey. We are experiencing an increase in demand to migrate from a traditional on-prem model to a subscription or full cloud conversion. Year to date, we have over 29,000 seats that have migrated, or nearly a third of our total seat population.

We also opened a new London headquarters last month, and a new New York headquarters in early December. We’ve brought in new leadership talent in terms of my direct reports – people with deep expertise in enterprise software, cloud infrastructure, and cloud service environments.

What market/technology trends are important for IPC and its customers?

Speed and communication connectivity are important. Desk traders ask how we can make their jobs easier – they want more efficiency, faster speed, and help with connectivity and counterparty discovery. Today there’s a massive disparity between voice and chat, with no real ability to seamlessly integrate voice and chat, transcribe it in real time, and then embed it into workflows in the CRM system, the order management system, and the execution management system. We have all those pieces and so is bringing that connectivity together in a way where communication, workflow and counterparty can work in a far more efficient way.

We can layer AI on top of it to provide unique insights. For example, think about the first three calls I should be making for this trade. Based on sentiment analysis, this other connectivity that is happening in the market, price discovery, etc. we can help make better decisions, faster. That’s what we’re really looking to bring to traders.

What are the ‘pain points’ for IPC customers?

A big pain point is the lack of connectivity. Traders still have to ‘swivel chairs’ between multiple systems on their desks. They want the ability to connect those and have workflow integration – not just between the communication systems, but also inputting into their CRM and connecting with the order management system. The chair swivel is a massive inefficiency in the market, and we see a massive opportunity to remove that and provide a seamless, integrated experience, from the origination of the trade all the way through legal, risk, compliance, and settlement.

What is the competitive landscape in IPC’s space?

A common view in the marketplace is that our most direct competitors are Symphony and BT Group. But there are also players like ICE, Bloomberg, LSEG, Microsoft Teams, and Cisco, which are a few examples that are on desks or in trade desk support and have connectivity. They can be viewed as current or potential new competitors, but they’re also partners in the space. If there’s one thing I learned about competition from my fintech experience in payments, it’s that competitors can come together in a way that solves big problems for users, so everyone ends up benefiting.

We did a partnership with ICE to integrate our voice into their chat that is now live in the market. That allows what you and I talked about to happen for a trader seamlessly to go between voice and chat with literally a click of a button. Historically we would have looked to build our own chat, and ICE would have looked to build their own voice. We now
have another network. We’re actually partnering to be able to solve a bigger issue in the market.

We can provide that regulated and compliant communication, simultaneously across channels. The connectivity can run through our device, and we have the ability to connect into anything or bring any application into our device. The competitive landscape is very fragmented. But we can figure out a way to bring it together in a more efficient way.

What is your longer-term vision for IPC?

Our longer-term vision is to be the central hub of connectivity for traders and trade support. Regardless if we own the asset, we have the ability to be that central point of connectivity.

Our ability to connect into networks, applications, and services to deliver that is a big opportunity for us because we already sit on the desks. And so the ability for more to connect into us, we have the opportunity to be the facilitator of that. With the role that IPC plays on the desk and the network we have, we have the ability to be that central hub of
connectivity, and to facilitate integration and interoperability. We already sit on desks – the big opportunity is leveraging that position to connect into networks, applications, and services.