Blog

The Finance community is struggling to adapt to a rapid evolution in communication practices. Technology has altered how clients and colleagues want to interact with one another.

More than ever before, business success depends upon an organization’s ability to communicate quickly and effectively. It’s clear that the “workplace” has radically changed. This new landscape demands three things from every company’s communication tools:

In December of 2021, SIFMA, ICI and DTCC called for the shortening of the settlement cycle in the U.S. financial markets from T+2 (transaction date plus two days) to T+1 (transaction date plus one day) within the first half of 2024. Their report indicates that accelerating the settlement process will “reduce risks and costs for the industry while building upon the benefits achieved in the successful move to T+2 in 2017.” This is in line with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s announcement on Feb 9, 2022 of a proposed rule to shorten the standard settlement cycle for most broker-dealer transactions from two business days after the trade date (“T+2″) to one business day after the trade date (“T+1″), while soliciting comments regarding challenges and possible approaches to achieving settlement by the end of trade date (“T+0″).

In our journey building an event mesh, we face the challenge of reconciling with Symphony’s engineering history. Specifically, we are transitioning from a single-tenant, monolithic architecture to a multi-tenant, microservice architecture. And critically, due to the nature of our business, this shift must be both progressive and smooth.

At Symphony, streamlining complex financial workflows is a core part of our mission, and automation is one of our most powerful tools for achieving this objective. For years, our developers as well as users throughout our community have built bots on the Symphony platform that automate individual processes or segments of workflows. These have ranged from integrations with tools like Salesforce and ServiceNow to streamlining customized client onboarding processes.

Since Symphony’s earliest days as a company, we have collaborated closely with our customers to ensure that our product both addresses their challenges and meets their needs. In that spirit of collaboration and in conjunction with Symphony’s board of directors, we recently formed a Technical Advisory Group (TAG) as a forum to discuss perspectives on technology with our customers and help to inform Symphony’s go-forward strategy. At its outset, the group committed to meeting twice a year to share knowledge and experience regarding technology trends and related Symphony initiatives, as well as to ensure that our development strategy aligns with our customers’ visions.