Symphony Innovate 2018 Showcases Community Engagement for Secure Team Collaboration

“Symphony enables a community of innovators – especially our customers and partners – to build the future of enterprise collaboration,” says David Gurlé, founder and CEO of Symphony.

“Our enterprise customers embrace the possibilities that automation, bots and workflows provide, all with the foundation of security and compliance that are required for critical business interactions. This is the wave of the future for financial services leaders as well as other industries focused on vital business operations.”

The Symphony community has developed a range of bots and automations which dramatically reduce manual processing and resolve major workflow challenges currently faced by the financial services industry.

“J.P. Morgan continues to advance workflow innovations on Symphony – right across the trade life-cycle. The benefits of partnership with the wider Symphony community are enabling us to deliver a connected and simple client experience while driving automation and efficiencies in how we operate,” says David Hudson, Managing Director, Co-Head of Digital Transformation at J.P. Morgan.

Elisha Wiesel, Goldman Sachs’ Chief Information Officer: “We are pleased to see Symphony entering the next phase in its evolution. Though it is still early stages, we are encouraged by the emergence of teams that seek to leverage the platform’s API, directory and secure collaboration capabilities to transform workflows. Looking at Goldman Sachs and the industry as a whole, we believe the Symphony platform and bot automation will be instrumental in eliminating inefficiencies across the trade lifecycle.”

“Ensemble – a Natixis collaboration between sales, trading and technology to create a global, in-house platform for publishing, marketing and trading axes (risk). Developed in Symphony, and powered by iPushPull, Ensemble delivers a streamlined digital marketplace that increases global communication and cross selling, while recycling risk and reducing costs,” Says Kevin Alexander, Deputy CEO and Head of Global Markets, Natixis CIB Americas.

Symphony Innovation Award Winners

At Symphony Innovate 2018, Symphony announced the latest winners of its Innovation Award, designed to honor customers and partners who transform legacy and manual workflows by developing unique, innovative bots, applications or integrations for the platform. Winning entries all represent innovations live in production.

AllianceBernstein wins for its Abbie bot, an AI-powered virtual assistant that allows its portfolio management teams to automate repetitive bond trading tasks. Abbie listens for trade instructions on Symphony, reads orders from spreadsheets, suggests Treasury trades based on tenor and currency, builds trades with a variety of bond analytics and quickly shows exposure to issuers. Traditionally, this has been a time-consuming process that could take up to hours to complete manually. Abbie performs these tasks in mere seconds today, giving AllianceBernstein a clear competitive edge in operational speed and efficiency. Abbie launched in early 2018 and currently processes 50% of all AllianceBernstein’s fixed income trades – a productivity improvement equating to roughly 50 hours per day.

“Our investment in technology like Abbie has given us a real competitive edge, and enabled us to access new pools of liquidity, capture alpha and better manage risk,” said Gavin Romm, Vice President and Portfolio Manager at AllianceBernstein. “Abbie has reduced inefficiencies and lets us focus on higher value-add activities. We’re becoming smarter and faster in other areas of our investment process.”

Vorto wins for its flexible and scalable bi-directional ServiceNow® and Symphony application, that supports a major financial services client’s trade reconciliation process. It provides users the ability to dynamically create a chatroom and draw in various internal and external parties to subsequently update and approve ServiceNow® workflows from Symphony.

The Vorto integration creates an efficient environment to manage this critical process through real-time collaboration between the client and counterparties. Since this integration has gone live, it has significantly reduced the overall time of the reconciliation process and has replaced secure email as the primary communication source. It has already resulted in at least one full time employee’s workload being able to be refocused on more valuable efforts, more will come as the process is further adopted.

“The trade reconciliation project was the first time we had joined together the power of ServiceNow® and Symphony. It proved the concept and now we have extended this by creating our unique Chat Connector application,” says Andrew Peck, co-founder of Vorto. “The opportunities are endless as we have opened up ServiceNow to be able to join any task or ticket to Symphony with just a few clicks. This solution can virtually eliminate Email as the primary method of communicating with ServiceNow®.”

Introducing the Symphony Scholarship

Symphony has also announced the Symphony Scholarship, which recognizes individuals who are making an impact in the field of cybersecurity. Upon selection, scholarship recipients will be awarded $5,000 as well as ongoing mentorship from the Symphony community.

Symphony Innovate 2018 Partner Showcase

The Symphony Partner Program powers complementary business applications to Symphony’s platform, many of which will be showcased at Symphony Innovate 2018:

AWS – For over 12 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS services are trusted by millions of active customers around the world to power their infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs.

Box* — Box is a cloud content management platform that empowers enterprises to bring all of their people, information and applications together in one place to revolutionize how they work. Founded in 2005, Box powers more than 87,000 businesses globally and 69 percent of the Fortune 500, including AstraZeneca, General Electric, P&G, and The GAP.

ChartIQ — ChartIQ provides HTML5 components and the Finsemble integration platform to banks, brokerages, trading platforms, and financial portals worldwide. Using ChartIQ technology large organizations are able to assemble and integrate different types of applications in hours instead of months. With over 250+ global customers, ChartIQ is one of the fastest growing companies in fintech and serves many of the largest names in finance including Factset, Fidessa, Nasdaq, and eToro to name a few.

Cloud9* — Cloud9 is a global industry solution for voice communications, delivering real-time, high-fidelity data across the financial markets. By digitizing the entire institutional trader voice lifecycle and providing innovative, secure and compliant means of delivering the associated metadata, Cloud9 enables traders to uncover and seize the value present within their voice trading conversations.

DTCC — With 45 years of experience, DTCC is the premier post-trade market infrastructure for the global financial services industry. The DTCC Exception Manager (DXM) platform allows market participants to publish, manage and communicate on exceptions throughout the trade lifecycle. DXM provides users with access to a central portal enabling a single view of all exceptions and analytics to help identify the root cause of operational breaks to solve issues at the source.

FactSet — FactSet, a global provider of integrated financial information, analytical applications, and industry-leading services, teams with Symphony to put the user workflow in focus; the seamless integration is designed to make Symphony feel like an extension of FactSet products and vice versa. Together, FactSet and Symphony will connect users across and within firms, foster collaboration while maintaining compliance, and elevate conversations with quick access to deep analysis.

FinTech Studios — APOLLO.ai seamlessly integrates with Symphony messaging and workflow to deliver intelligent search, dynamic channels, dashboards, real-time alerts, market data and big-data analytics leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language indexing millions of curated global sources of business and financial news, blogs, research, regulatory sources and market data in 32 languages.

Globanet* — Globanet is a leading developer of email and data migration, archiving and eDiscovery solutions. Merge1 helps Symphony clients include Symphony communications into their email archive so that conversations taking place over the Symphony platform can be retained, supervised for compliance and searched during eDiscovery.

Google Cloud — Google Cloud’s portfolio of products, technologies, and services that enable developers to build, test, and deploy applications on Google Cloud’s highly-scalable and reliable infrastructure. Solutions include cloud computing, data storage, data analytics, and machine learning. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) enables Symphony’s customers to scale globally with higher reliability and lower latency, while satisfying security and compliance requirements.

IHS Markit — IzzyBot provides an efficient way to gather entity data, provide status updates and assign tasks throughout the Client Onboarding lifecycle. By connecting Symphony to Counterparty Manager, users now have a solution to automatically find, access, and request entity data and documentation. This automated search mechanism reduces e-mail and phone communication while making the Onboarding process more efficient.

ipushpull – ipushpull is a live data sharing, collaboration and workflow automation platform. Used across sell-side and buy-side, and front to back office, ipushpull improves workflow efficiency by allowing data interoperability and cross application automation by connecting Symphony to Excel, databases, cloud services and internal platforms. The company has previously won the Symphony Innovation award for its offering.

Market EarlyBird – EarlyBird is Safe, Smart Twitter for Finance. Follow anyone anonymously, use AI-powered SmartTracks to deep-dive when other sources aren’t giving the full story, and stay informed with pre-built financial, economic and political collections. It’s read-only, so there’s no Tweeting, no direct messaging and all received Tweets are recorded for compliance purposes.

MDX Technology Ltd. —The award winning MDX Connect platform is a “fast to value” solution in use by many of the world’s leading financial firms. It is proven to help users seamlessly capture and extract maximum value from market data and create lucrative new trading opportunities. They can also republish real time pricing and proprietary data, both internally and to multiple external third parties, faster and more securely than ever before. Benefits include; significantly enhanced business workflow and collaboration capabilities, lower risk exposure, improved productivity and reduced operating costs.

NexJ Systems Inc. — NexJ Systems is a provider of Intelligent Customer Management software for the financial services industry. NexJ CRM and Symphony combine to be a powerful productivity tool that allows corporate banking firms and wealth managers to better engage on accounts. Corporate banking firms can leverage Symphony’s powerful messaging capabilities alongside NexJ’s award-winning Intelligent Customer Management software to enhance communication between colleagues and clients thereby improving the customer experience.

Selerity — Selerity is a financial technology company using proprietary A.I. to deliver content and data solutions designed to automate inefficient workflows in finance. The Company’s clients range from sophisticated asset management firms and banks on Wall Street to innovative media and technology companies serving retail investors. The Company’s Private Context Engine (PCE) is a natural language processing (NLP) engine and suite of analytics that intelligently harness digital communications between the sell-side and buy-side to help fixed income professionals uncover new revenue opportunities, use less balance sheet, and comply with regulations.

Smarsh* — Smarsh helps organizations get ahead – and stay ahead – of the risk within their electronic communications. Symphony customers can support their compliance and e-discovery initiatives by capturing, archiving and monitoring platform communications in their native format, alongside content from the industry’s widest breadth of channels.

Tier1CRM — Tier1CRM is a leader in capital markets CRM. Built on top of the Salesforce platform, Tier1CRM’s flagship product, ACE, is an HTML application suite that helps sell-side and buy-side clients generate new revenue opportunities, improve customer service, and achieve greater efficiency across the organization. Tier1CRM gives clients a “single pane of glass” view into client and employee activity and is currently utilized by tens of thousands of users across the sales and trading, corporate and investment banking, and investment management landscape.

Trovo — Trovo builds analytic environments to support pricing and risk operations for fixed income investment portfolios. At Symphony Innovate 2018, Trovo demoed its RiskOps service running as a chatbot in a Symphony session. RiskOps supports real-time tracking of prices and risk metrics for fixed income securities. RiskOps marshals data feeds, parses messages, provides on-demand analytics, and exposes an open API for clients’ risk models.

Vorto* — Vorto is a specialist in Enterprise Service Management tools and processes with deep experience of delivering large complex global change transformation programs. Their application connects Symphony to ServiceNow through a unique design that can be implemented quickly and simply to connect any task to any chat with no coding required. Once deployed, the Chat Connector can reduce Email volume and provide a feature rich capability to ease the burden of interacting with tickets and approvals.

*Sponsors of Symphony Innovate, pending members of the Symphony Partner Program.

About Symphony

Symphony offers a secure team collaboration platform that transforms the way users communicate effectively and securely with a single workflow application. Forging a new path in the industry, Symphony is designed to help individuals, teams and organizations of all sizes improve productivity, while meeting complex data security and regulatory compliance needs. Symphony was founded in October 2014 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, with offices in Hong Kong, London, New York, Paris, Singapore, Sophia-Antipolis, Stockholm and Tokyo.

For more information, visit www.symphony.com and connect with Symphony on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Media Contact

Katherine Kilpatrick, Director of Corporate Communications
[email protected], 650.262.1563