How Does The Oculus Rift Relate To Finance?

The BZ Fintech Awards feature some of the most prolific companies in the modern fintech sphere. Ahead of Tuesday’s event, Benzinga is highlighting some of the event’s most innovative attendees. 

Who he is: Tim Burcham, head of labs and personalization at Markit Digital. As head of the Labs group, he’s focused on experiments that relate financial services to the cusp of technology.

What does Markit Digital do?

Burcham:  At Markit Digital, we create, manage, and continuously improve end-to-end digital user experiences to drive engagement. Our approach, an intelligent delivery system for improved build lifecycles and real-time analytics, shortens build times, leverages tagged data, and produces dynamic visualizations increasing customer engagement.

Using design, technology and data innovation, we provide solutions that drive better outcomes for our clients by addressing the entire digital lifecycle in the financial market. Today, it isn’t enough to simply present information. Customers expect information to be relevant based on their behavior or their holdings. 

What is the Labs group?

Burcham: The Digital Labs group is focused on facilitating experiments of various sorts with our design and technology teams. Those might be internal projects that tech teams want to take on, such as natural language processing. Some things we have done recently are with the Oculus Rift and virtual reality. 

How does the Oculus Rift relate to finance?

Burcham: It bridges the gap between experimental technology (stuff that is almost to the point of novelty) and making it practical and grounded. When it comes to the Oculus Rift, we had a client that wanted data visualization on general trading activity so we recreated the physical experience of trading in a Chicago trading pit.

We were able to combine data visualization with virtual reality to create an experience where the user is in a physical pit with CNBC videos and interactive charts. 

What excited you about fintech and finance and the merging of the two industries? 

Burcham: When we started in this industry, you couldn’t get a stock quote without calling a broker on the phone or sending a fax. New technology enabled firms to trade online and that was the period when we really hit our stride.