What AV does a trading floor need?

A trading floor needs turret and dealer-board integration, multi-panel video walls with low-latency feeds, squawk box and hoot 'n' holler audio, MIFID II call recording, and sub-second redundancy on every critical path. It is different from a boardroom in every dimension, and it should not be designed by the same team that designed the executive floor.

From the floor. The non-negotiable on a dealer-position spec is the failover behaviour of the AV-over-IP decoder during a market open. We test by physically pulling a network cable from a live decoder while watching a Bloomberg TV feed; the redundant path must take over inside a second with no black frame, or the design is wrong. SDVoE and Q-SYS NV both can do it, but only with a properly meshed dual-network topology and dual-source bonded encoders. Half the trading-floor builds I have inherited had single-path video labelled as redundant. — David Corker, Technical Sales Director

The dealer position is the design unit. Each desk seats one trader with four to eight monitors (often a dual-tier mount, four below and four above), an IP turret (BT IP Trade, Etrali, IPC) for voice with hundreds of pre-programmed direct dial counterparts, and a tightly integrated PC, KVM and headset infrastructure. Power, cooling and cable management have to be uplift-rated; a typical trading desk pulls 1.5 to 2 kW per position, which is 4 to 5 times a normal office desk. This drives the M&E spec long before the AV gear is chosen.

Video walls are the visible centrepiece. A typical trading floor video wall runs 60 to 240 panels (LCD or fine-pitch LED), fed from an AV-over-IP backbone (SDVoE or Q-SYS NV) routing live market TV (Bloomberg TV, CNBC, Reuters), trading platform dashboards, risk feeds and economic calendar overlays. Sub-second redundancy is the brief: a panel failure during the London open is unacceptable, so multi-source redundant decoders, redundant network paths and an out-of-hours hot-swap process all have to be designed in.

Squawk box / hoot 'n' holler broadcast audio links the floor to other offices (NY, HK, Frankfurt) and to the back office. Always-on, low-latency, codec-aware, with mute and PTT (push to talk) controls at every position. Recording is mandatory under MIFID II Article 16: every voice call, every turret line, every squawk channel captured and retained for 5 to 7 years. The recording platform (Verint, NICE, ASC, Red Box) integrates at the turret level rather than at room level.

Glass-walled exec offices that overlook the floor have their own AV brief: a head trader or desk lead position with its own video wall extension, dial-in from the turret system, privacy glass that can switch opaque, and a separate VC stack so the office can be used for confidential calls without the floor noise leaking in. The financial services AV brief should treat exec offices as a hybrid of boardroom and dealer position, not as a generic meeting room.

Quick reference: dealer position (4 to 8 monitors per desk, IP turret integration, 1.5 to 2 kW power per seat), 60 to 240 panel video wall (AV-over-IP backbone, redundant decoders), MIFID II call recording on every voice path, squawk box / hoot 'n' holler broadcast audio, glass-walled exec offices with hybrid VC and dealer-board extension.