By David Gurlé, founder and CEO, Symphony Communication Services
Today, we have announced that I will be stepping back from the day-to-day operations of Symphony and will remain on the board of directors to support the company on strategic matters. Symphony’s president and chief commercial officer, Brad Levy, will become our chief executive officer on June 1, 2021.
To give you a little background, I founded a company called Perzo, which was acquired by a consortium of the world’s top financial institutions in 2014. While with this acquisition Symphony was officially born, the real story goes all the way back to the early 2000s – a story I can’t wait to share at a later date…
After its initial inception and commercialization phases of Symphony, we have scaled up our company across all dimensions. We grew our community to 500k+ users across 500+ firms. Our product portfolio ranges from the award winning Symphony Desktop designed for financial services to value added workflows, enterprise systems integrations, and our open and powerful platform enabling thousands of third party apps and bots. I can undoubtedly, and proudly, say we managed to build the most valuable foundation and infrastructure for the financial services market.
As 2020 showed, we were the right solution for the right time. Symphony is widely considered by financial institutions as a digital transformation partner and key technology infrastructure vendor. We are accompanying our customers in their day to day operations for efficiency; we are making their interactions with their customers richer, bringing more loyalty from them. Despite very challenging times, due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, we were able to support our customers’ business continuity plans as they transitioned to remote working, facilitating innovation and supporting their operations and businesses.
Symphony is now on a journey to build up broad and bespoke solutions from these strong foundations reaffirming our mission to be the integration hub and platform of our customers information ecosystem.
Brad and I met in 2004 and since then we had worked with each other – but not yet together – to bring to market what Symphony is today. So I was very pleased to bring him on board in July last year as the president of the company, and my successor.
We had set in motion my succession plan with a board of directors subcommittee when I told them in late 2018 of my desire to take a step back from day-to-day operations in 2021. Three years later, with the plan successfully executed, I am very happy to hand over to Brad the role of the CEO of the company. Brad Levy is the best leader to take Symphony through its next chapter. His financial markets expertise, passion for what Symphony stands for and his network are second to none. I am confident Symphony will be in great hands under his leadership and looking forward to partnering with Brad as he takes the company forward and upward.
It has been the greatest honor, joy and pleasure to lead Symphony to where we are today, to build a global and diverse team that is so talented and committed to our customers’ success, and to the company.
A huge THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart to our investors, to my team and to all our customers and supporters of Symphony throughout these last six and a half years. You have made me a better person and given me wonderful memories that will last a lifetime.
Au revoir!
Be a part of what’s next Request demo Secure communication is in the spotlight, or rather the lack of secure communication. Media headlines about security
The current digital environment provides organizations with a range of messaging solutions, each characterized by varying levels of security and compliance capabilities. This has become particularly prominent as people add messaging apps to their personal and professional workflows as a complement to e-mail.
Symphony’s Cloud9 has been awarded ‘Best Sell-Side Trading Communication System’ at WatersTechnology’s Sell-Side Technology Awards 2025.
In this interview we hear how Cloud9 differentiates itself with a modern, cloud-native approach to trader voice. It requires no on-premise infrastructure and functions primarily as a software application, aligning with broader cloud-based communication trends.
Cloud9’s flexible architecture empowers technology teams with robust deployment, while seamlessly supporting remote and mobile work. Michael Lynch also explains the plans for the mobile app and how it will extend voice beyond the desk to users on the go, offering 24/7 trading control.
Watch the interview to learn more.
