The Perfect Award Submission

Winter is leaving.

The temperatures are slowly beginning to climb, and rain is replacing snow. All this can only mean one thing: It's awards season.

Now, before you get ahead of yourself, I'm not talking about those fancy celebrities and their red carpet. The awards season I speak of brings together the best and brightest in financial technology to honor them.

Every year WatersTechnology holds five sets of awards: Sell-Side Technology Awards, Inside Market Data/Inside Reference Data Awards, Waters Rankings, Buy-Side Technology Awards and the American Financial Technology Awards.

Traditionally, the SST Awards kick off the start of the season for us. This year is no different, as the event will be held April 21 at the Marriott Marquis and is preceded by the North American Trading and Architecture Summit.

The deadline for putting in an entry for one of the 26 categories currently open is quickly approaching. This Friday, Feb. 19, is your last chance to tell us why your firm is so deserving of an award. You can do so here.

Now, although WatersTechnology US editor Anthony Malakian and I did give tips on the best way to make a submission during our past two podcasts, which can be found here and here, I figured I might as well give some advice for those looking to take a trip to the winners' circle.

For those of you that have already submitted your entry, fret not! This advice is good for all future submissions.

What Makes a Good Award Submission?

First and foremost, like any good story, a submission needs to be structured. To put it simply, every entry should follow the same basic outline: What was the problem? How did you build your platform/solution/application to solve it? What was the result?

Obviously, you can alter from this slightly, but that's the general idea. The goal is to show the judges how your technology helped users to overcome a problem they were dealing with.

To that point, make sure it's timely. No one wants to read about a solution for a problem that existed in 2013. If the product has been around for a while, then talk about how a recent enhancement helped users over the past year.

Second, make sure the entry is unique to the submission. Many vendors enter multiple submissions, which is fine. Lots of firms have products and services that qualify for multiple services. With that being said, copying and pasting the same generic submission for several categories isn't going to cut it.

If you want to prove you're worthy of the award, then you're going to have to show us. The submissions have a max length of 500 words. I don't think it's asking too much for you to take some time to individually work on each entry.

Finally, understand that this is not a press release. I know a lot of PR teams work with business and IT executives on these submissions. That's fine. Just understand your entry will not be seen by the general public. This is only going to be read by WatersTechnology's editors and senior-level end users.

The point is that the flashy terms often put in press releases aren't needed. The judges are simply looking for a solid description of the product and how it has helped clients. Save the fancy adjectives and adverbs for a rainy day.

Food For Thought

• I mentioned it earlier, but the Waters Wavelength podcast has been around for an entire month now. We've got four podcasts under our belt. The most recent one is definitely worth a listen. Anthony and I switched things up by talking about eight topics from the past week. One of us had a bit more difficulty with the rapid-fire rounds than the other. Check it out here.

• IBM announced its looking to help developers in the blockchain space, in what was the biggest news story of the week from a trading technology perspective. I mentioned this before on our podcast, but I feel like I could write my column every week on a different announcement about blockchain. There is no denying that the technology has the full attention of everyone in financial services.