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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.

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.

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.

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.

Voice trading continues to be a pivotal element of daily workflows across the institutional marketplace, which means that access to greater voice metadata is imperative for strategic, regulatory and operational purposes. In the fourth episode of Cloud9’s podcast series examining developments in the voice trading landscape, Cloud9 CAO and Head of Partnerships Brian Hunt and Verint VP of Product Strategy Phil Fry examine the who, where, what and why of accessing greater voice metadata and how this will progress as we near the end of one of the most challenging years in recent memory.

This year’s Digital APAC Hackathon had a total of 29 participants from 8 teams competing for the Most Cutting-Edge Technical Development, Most Impactful Business Automation and Best Work From Home Workflow awards.

During our virtual Symphony Innovate New York 2020 event, it was my pleasure to host a breakout panel discussion on operations workflows featuring three leaders from the Symphony community, representing BlackRock, BNY Mellon and Credit Suisse.