Blog

Last week we concluded the Symphony U: Fintech Challenge – a Symphony programming competition held for university students across the United States.

You’re probably familiar with the concept of spiritual nirvana, a transcendent state of being associated with Buddhism. What if we applied this concept to the workplace — more specifically, to workflows used by traders at buy- and sell-side financial firms? What would “workflow nirvana” look like, and what would it take to achieve it?

As the financial industry continues to transition towards a predominantly virtual environment, institutional traders need to be able to easily access the right tools to stay connected and enhance workflow efficiencies. In the fifth episode of Cloud9’s podcast series examining developments in the voice trading landscape, Cloud9’s Chief Innovation Officer and Co-founder Leo Papadopoulos, and Chief Operating Officer Jim Miller, examine what voice trading capabilities institutional traders must have in a distributed workplace and how a cloud-based platform can provide a more secure, mobile and accessible ecosystem.

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.

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.