Growth in Symphony User Base Drives Powerful Workflow Efficiencies Across Financial Services Community

Expanding Set of Companies Now Use Symphony for Both Inter- and Intra-Company Collaboration

PALO ALTO, CA, APRIL 27, 2017 – Symphony Communication Services, LLC announced today that a growing network of customers, including AB, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BlackRock, BNP Paribas, BNP Paribas Investment Partners, BNY Mellon, Citadel, Citi, CLSA, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Asset Management, Dow Jones, Factset, Goldman Sachs, IHS Markit, Jefferies, J.P. Morgan, Kepler Chevreux, Kingdon Capital, KCG, Maverick, Morgan Stanley, Nomura, Redburn, RBC, Selerity, Societe Generale, Sycomore Asset Management, T. Rowe Price and Wells Fargo, now use Symphony for internal and external collaboration. In the near future, Balyasny, The Boston Company Asset Management, Boston Partners, Commerzbank, Crédit Agricole CIB, HSBC, Natixis, UBS and other companies will also be joining the Symphony inter-company communications network.

Bringing customer workflows into the Symphony platform enables users to communicate internally and externally, consume and share data feeds, and integrate with firm systems and third party applications. Symphony has eliminated the barriers to adoption for the financial services industry by offering the only secure and compliant solution for cross-company collaboration, thanks to its customer-owned encryption key security model. It is now the platform of choice for the financial industry, enabling all users to benefit from the strength and participation of their entire community of colleagues.

This wave of adoption has enabled an entirely new workflow to emerge among the 200,000 licensed users on Symphony: one that is more efficient, integrated and automated. For instance, Symphony tags and filters solve traditional challenges of inefficient content distribution and consumption by allowing users to focus on only relevant information. Customer-developed bots using Symphony’s open APIs have created endless possibilities to automate cumbersome processes. In addition, partner application integrations bring the entire business lifecycle onto one platform.

“Secure and compliant cross-company workflow is a game-changer. The entire financial community can now quickly and cost effectively connect using Symphony to have rich, interactive conversations and take action,” said David Gurlé, founder and CEO of Symphony. “The financial services industry has a pressing need to simplify disparate communications streams. Based on this momentum, we expect to see a tidal wave of innovation to streamline traditional financial services workflows.”

“We’re innovating to change how we receive and filter content to reduce information overload for our trading desk. We welcome innovations that improve the transfer of information and communication between the buy and sell side,” said Mike Bellaro, global head of equity trading, Deutsche Asset Management.  “Improved information flow and front to back end communication allow us to better understand what news or events are trending, which helps us make informed trading decisions.”

“Symphony has made a step change in how all of the employees in our Corporate & Investment Bank interact, across the same platform as our clients,” said David Hudson, Managing Director and Head of Markets Execution at J.P. Morgan. “We look forward to further unlocking its potential as we integrate partner applications and APIs, and transform how we work – to be smarter, more secure and more efficient than we already are today.”

“Cross-company collaboration is critical to streamlining complex workflow and to helping people work efficiently,” notes Brad Levy, managing director, head of Loans at IHS Markit and CEO of MarkitSERV. “There is vast potential for Symphony within our platforms and for workflow apps integrated with our services. We’ve already demonstrated how trade breaks can be resolved in Symphony and affirmed back to counterparties with MarkitSERV automatically updating the trade.”