Financial services firms are in the unenviable position of catering to sophisticated customers that expect the highest standards of privacy and security while also complying with stringent regulations that require absolute transparency on-demand whenever needed, often for transactions that occurred years ago. At the same time, rigid processes and legacy technologies can inhibit the digital transformations underway at most firms.
The financial sector faces a unique paradox. It needs both the utmost transparency but also the utmost security (and of course compliance). How do you solve this? David Gurlé
For the financial industry, trust has always been considered a foundational principle. Symphony’s solution – to create a safe enclave where the exchange of information between trusted users is fully automated – was viewed with scepticism at first when we were founded 6 years ago.
Partial trust is unacceptable, and any network is only as strong as its weakest link, so firms must ‘trust but verify’.
In this context, security must be implemented as layers, from measures taken on-premises to solutions used by partners tasked with storing or treating data hosted off-site. In this context, Symphony’s truly end-to-end encrypted collaboration solution (and backed by our verified, trusted director of half a million financial services users) acts as an overarching shield that makes the entire communication chain both secure and trustworthy. When required, Symphony can also deliver regulatory transparency via tools like a key-split mechanism, whereby an encryption key is divided into parts given to various custodians, to be re-assembled only upon the request of clients or regulators.
When it comes to trust, Symphony sought a world class foundational partner for cloud services underpinning the Symphony platform. Over the past few years, Symphony built and has expanded its partnership with AWS. AWS’s open architecture is designed to deliver security and flexibility at the lowest possible cost as part of an agnostic solution available to firms across industries, including finance. As Steven Quick notes “We are democratising access to machine learning so that anyone can access our APIs and explore what works for them. As we can constantly integrate security measures informed from our experience in various industries, we can deliver an up-to-date solution to all users”.
Crucially, AWS’s multi-tenancy approach means that users only pay for what they need, giving even small firms the ability to handle huge capacity without having to invest in developing and maintaining a proprietary architecture that may not remain competitive over time.