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.

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.