Brad Levy, chief executive of Symphony said the markets’ infrastructure and technology platform’s can grow through this cycle due to its real-time system and its ability to protect data.

Levy told Markets Media: “We would love to be a destination for people to go to, and even more, to show up in existing workflows. We are showing up in applications and people will see us as a more embedded platform, similar to PayPal which just needs one click in the store where you are shopping.”

He continued that an environment like a Smart TV with an operating system that allows cable alongside 10 streaming apps does not really exist in the financial industry.

“That is coming and we are an enabler,” said Levy. “We think it’s just a matter of time before people have an environment where all things coexist and interoperate.”

The theme of Levy’s keynote at Symphony’s Innovate 2023 summit in London in May was how humans have moved in cycles from the Age of Fire and that we are now in the middle of the highly compressed Age of Information.

“Three mega trends are driving this very big cycle change – technology, geopolitics and a combination of climate change challenges and energy policy,” he said. “One key feature of this cycle that might be the most unique is speed.”

For example, Credit Suisse was acquired by UBS in days and First Republic bank failed and was bought by JP Morgan over a weekend.

Symphony believes that firms who proactively manage and leverage their data will thrive in this environment as there are opportunities to know more, to do more and to work together more to achieve chosen outcomes for both institutions and individuals.

“It is, without a doubt, a higher velocity tomorrow,” said Levy. “Our goals at Symphony are quite simple –  to reduce stress on the system, to reduce stress for people and ultimately allow more balance and innovation for all. “

Amenity Analytics

At Innovate 2023 Symphony showcased the capabilities of Amenity Analytics, the natural language processing and business insights platform it acquired in November last year to deliver products powered by artificial intelligence, and support the need for environmental, social and governance (ESG) data in financial services.

“The future of AI is providing secure compute environments where people feel comfortable using highly sensitive data that is not going to flow down into ChatGPT or Bard,” said Levy. “We are an encrypted network that doesn’t own data.”

He gave the example of banks initially blocking social media, but they now provide a gateway to those tools on more secure and trusted platforms. Levy argued that Symphony can be one of the logical gateways into AI applications for global finance.

“We can be a portal to analyzing large proprietary datasets, widely available public data, as well as the metadata that exists in between in partnership with firms such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google,” he added.

Amenity Analytics also puts Symphony in the conversation with a product for analyzing semi-structured data such as in research, earnings calls and news, according to Levy.

“We are really starting to think about how to provide easy access to data in the highly unstructured world of chat,” he said.

Levy believes voice is coming back, especially in volatile times, as people want to be on the phone with a trusted party to move a big block of risk. He also thinks audio and video will be as big as text in the next couple of years as you can hear more than you can read, and you can speak a lot more than you can type.

Solving industry challenges

Growth will also be driven by solving industry challenges such as making client onboarding and corporate actions more efficient. Symphony is also targeting very specific challenges such as T+1 settlements.

The standard settlement cycle for most US broker-dealer transactions in securities will be reduced from two business days after a trade, T+2, to T+1 on 28 May 2024 in the US and on the previous day in Canada, The US Securities and Exchange Commission said the aim of the change is to reduce latency, lower risk, and promote efficiency and greater liquidity. 

Levy said that a year ago Symphony was less of an obvious player in the settlements space, but it has the advantage of being a unique real-time platform. When T+1 comes into effect some firms will have just three to four hours to figure out if they have an error as the ‘follow the sun’ model will not work.”

“A real-time platform has value in calls to action, understanding the challenges and we are working across market participants including financial market infrastructures that focus on settlements and clearing, and trade associations like SIFMA and FIA Tech,” he added.

In addition, Symphony has invested in extensibility in the back end so clients can embed the platform in applications in a very rich and non-intrusive way.

In May Symphony announced an integration with Taskize, a provider of inter-company workflow to the financial services industry so users users can share a live view of the trade exception or settlement issue that is automatically synchronised. This will allow break to resolved faster, which is important in the move to T+1.

Philip Slavin, chief executive of Taskize, said in a statement: “For too long, operations teams and their colleagues and counterparts on the trading desk have been restricted in their communication by outdated manual processes and an overreliance on phone and email. This integration will enable users on both platforms to seamlessly collaborate to resolve urgent and unresolved issues.”

Levy believes Symphony has as much value to add in banking as in capital markets, and also in private credit which he described as “a sea of low-tech.”

“New issue processes, balance sheet restructurings, and private equity and private credit could benefit from our model, which is human driven and about using high tech to curate relationships,” he said.

Sustainability

The Amenity Analytics acquisition has also put Symphony in a really good position in ESG according to Levy. For example, Amenity Analytics can analyze how many deceptive terms are in earnings calls.

At Innovate 2023 client there was a demonstration of Amenity’s ESG Insights platform and a large language model being used to create a proof of concept for a customizable ESG summarization bot in Symphony. When queried, the bot provided accurate, timely and actionable data driven insights. 

Another important focus for Symphony is the company’s own sustainability journey. Levy describes sustainability as a business concept and a very logical corporate mission.

We are pleased to welcome @Symphony to the UN Global Compact Network USA. We especially look forward to their participation in our Climate Ambition Accelerator, a program that supports biz leaders in accelerating progress towards setting science-based emissions reduction targets https://t.co/5HucTHZVGg

— UN Global Compact USA (@GlobalCompactUS) May 9, 2023

Symphony started by developing an ESG framework and then joined the UN Global Compact to make specific commitments.

“I believe in net energy creation and we send people alerts to make sure that they can see a settlement failing without them having to dig through a sea of emails,” Levy added. “In our ESG framework we allow for remote work which is a really important thing for carbon footprint.”