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Our latest thinking, insights and updates

Tech4Fin

Navigating Distributed Compliance in Today’s Institutional Landscape

The last year has been a whirlwind for everyone. And while regulators such as the CFTC have offered temporary relief and extensions to certain voice trading and record-keeping rules in the increasingly virtual environment, distributed compliance parameters still remain a pivotal element of the institutional landscape. A distributed workforce is not a new concept in any industry, including capital markets. However, a lot of firms continue to struggle with how to address the challenges they’ve faced in the process, particularly in a shifting market ecosystem. While every company needs to employ remote working capabilities, there’s no question that it is difficult to manage and can create potential compliance challenges.

Tech4Fin

Practicing What We Preach: Automated Workflows, Collaboration, and SymBot

At the end of last year, we introduced SymBot: the first Symphony bot built specifically to provide automated support to Symphony users. I couldn’t be more proud of the team – while improving the Symphony user experience was our top priority and primary goal for SymBot, the bot also serves the important function of demonstrating core capabilities and strengths of the Symphony platform.

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Tech4Fin

What you need to know about Symphony’s Bot Developer Kit 2.0

At the dawn of 2021, Symphony launched a new version of its Bot Developer Kit, the BDK 2.0. This toolkit provides the same support as Symphony’s existing SDKs for basic features such as datafeed handling and API bindings but simplifies many aspects like configuration, authentication, real-time events, and message templating. It also includes new advanced features like the Activities API as well as optional framework integration for Spring Boot developers.

Innovation

Looking For This? Symphony 2.0 Introduces Faster, More Intuitive Search Functions

The ability to find information and the answer to any question at an instant is standard today. We’re accustomed to finding everything we want to know with one click, or a question to our virtual assistant. So how do we take that expectation and translate this to Symphony? The need for content discovery to work seamlessly and quickly while keeping our customer data secure at the same time is a tall order, but I am thrilled to say we’ve done that and more.

Tech4Fin

Gamestop was a Magma Moment, But Financial Ops Teams Got Burned…

What happened over the past few weeks was what I term a “magma moment” in the financial markets. Reddit. WallStreetBets. GameStop. And more. Something molten and disruptive erupted and will change the landscape of the financial markets as it now turns igneous. The market volatility and agility were on full display. But the financial operations teams in the middle and back office were the ones who truly felt the heat and pain. More accounts to onboard, more transactions needing to ensure settlement. It all meant longer hours, more pressure and duress added to existing stresses. Exacerbated by disconnected and tedious manual processes in both client lifecycle and transaction lifecycle management. We just saw market fundamentals disrupted in real-time. But…there is a parallel (and more positive) disruption required to transform client onboarding and post transaction processes. It needs to happen. And soon. Think: augmented operations. Human-centric collaboration technology, automated workflows that dramatically reduce (someday even eliminate) the email/phone/fax productivity death loop.

Symphony 2.0
Innovation

From 1.5 to 2.0: How End Users Directly Influenced the Evolution of Symphony

Since introducing Symphony 2.0, we’ve shared blogs on a few different elements of the product: from the accompanying mobile app, to the guiding principles of its development, to new features like workspaces. We’ve noted before that user input, feedback and usage data played a significant role in shaping Symphony 2.0. Recently, we hosted a webinar to share these user insights and show the Symphony community why we built 2.0 the way we did–as well as demo some of the features inspired by customer feedback:

Tech4Fin

GreenKey Research Bot Wins Symphony Hackathon

GreenKey Technologies recently competed in Symphony’s New York Hackathon where they won the Most Cutting Edge Workflow award for their GK Research Bot, created to help increase efficiency between sell-side and buy-side research teams.

Tech4Fin

CEDAR Bot: A Symphony Hackathon Winner

CapitalMarkets Online won the Most Impactful Business Automation award in Symphony’s recently held London hackathon. The team competed with the CEDAR bot, which stands for Cross Entity Document Approval and Review. CEDAR is a solution that allows for cross company review and approval of documents and tracking of changes.