In 2015 Brad Levy, who is now chief executive of Symphony, said in an article, It’s the Community, Stupid, as collaboration was getting much needed attention in the industry.

“After years of either closed systems or very inefficient email and phone based workflow, a solution is on the horizon. The startup Symphony, in Palo Alto, California, has broad support and a unique community in the form of an open source foundation is at the heart of this effort,” he wrote.

Symphony launched in 2014 as an open architecture messaging platform to enable real-time cross-company communication. Ten years later, Levy describes Symphony as four interconnected platforms for messaging, voice, directory and analytics (MVDA).

Levy joined Symphony in 2020 during the global pandemic as president and chief commercial officer from IHS Markit, and became chief executive in the following year. He told Markets Media that a highlight of Symphony’s first decade is not an individual moment, but the last three to four years.

On the macro level, he explained that Symphony has been through the pandemic, ongoing wars, the inflation shock and market volatility while raising capital and transforming the  business. “Seeing the team execute through that is pretty remarkable,” Levy added.

Symphony was initially launched with the support of banks but Levy said the conversation has become much broader with the buy side becoming very active, and partnerships, such as with financial market infrastructures. Use has also broadened from the front to the back office, and across asset classes, especially through the embedded collaboration platform, which Levy described as a “huge transformation” in terms of delivering and distributing product. For example, some banks have embedded Symphony into their client portals.

He stressed that Symphony will be embedded in workflows in various ways, which is a competitive differentiator. For example, Symphony could be embedded in Salesforce for the sell side, while the buy side could be accessing Symphony via the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the US clearing infrastructure.

At the Symphony Innovate conference in New York in April this year, DTCC highlighted that Symphony was embedded with Central Trade Match, its platform to allocate and centrally match transactions globally. This was important as US settlement cycles were cut from two days after a trade, T+2 , to  T+1 in May this year.

Levy used the analogy of customers using Apple Pay when it is embedded in their shopping apps.

“It is just native to your shopping experience,” he added. “In 2025 people will be where we pop up in many places where they are already working.”

Communication technology

Levy continued that the pandemic highlighted one of the overarching trends of the last 10 years – the importance of communication technology – which spans across numerous systems WhatsApp, Slack, Teams to mobile phones and even the regulatory focus on record retention.

“I think that has been a big realization through our ten-year arc,” Levy added.

The combination of artificial intelligence, data and agent bots present new opportunities today. For example, in 2022 Symphony acquired Amenity Analytics, a natural language processing (NLP) data analytics offering which provides actionable insights to portfolio managers, analysts and other financial markets participants.

“We acquired Amenity right before GPT was released to the world,” added Levy. “We are in the space natively and aiming to become one of the AI access points for the industry so they can get models and tools into their workflow.”

In November last year Symphony said it was combining its AI and domain expertise with Google Cloud’s transcription and generative artificial intelligence capabilities to enhance its Cloud9 voice product with speech-to-text fine-tuning and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities.

At the Symphony Innovate conference the company highlighted the use of AI when used with its Cloud9 Trader Voice product. For example, the technology can provide high-accuracy transcription, extract detailed analysis with models trained in trading floor jargon, and support deal tagging to allow users to extract deal-related information from voice calls.

“Voice is where we are the best-of-breed and gaining good share,” said Levy. “We are starting to bring our messaging and voice assets together to produce a common directory.”

Cloud9 and Symphony currently have two separate directories.

At Symphony Innovate the company also said it will be interoperable with Microsoft Teams. Internal Teams users can be connected natively through Symphony’s directory and they can be connected to external contacts on WhatsApp, SMS and WeChat through the embedded Symphony Connect app.

Growth strategy

Symphony has said it is used by more than 625,000 financial professionals in over 1,000 institutions but Levy said it has room to increase penetration, even within the firm’s biggest clients. In addition, he argued there is still plenty of growth in areas such as wealth management and  capital markets, while the insurance industry is also starting to address its messaging challenges.

The company is also expanding geographically after initially focussing on the major financial centres. In May this year Symphony chose Belfast as the location for a multifunctional hub and also established a commercial office in the Abu Dhabi Global Market.

Over the next 10 years Levy believes that  distributed tech and centralized governance will be the way forward for the industry. The cloud will be hugely relevant but is highly centralized, power hungry and inefficient for certain processes.

“We want to keep the processing where the data is, as opposed to pushing the data up to be processed,” he said. “Imagine a building with solar power having the ability to have its own little data center, which could form part of a distributed network.”

Levy said Symphony is sustainable financially and shifted from needing capital to build to being in growth mode.

“In 10 years I would like the platform to be extremely relevant as a verb and an adjective,” he added. “I want people to say, ‘I’m going to Symphony you’ and at the other end, people will be using it and won’t even know the company exists.”

It’s Still the Community, Stupid