Innovate 2019: Celebrating Five Years of Community and Innovation

Our Innovate New York 2019 conference featured a demo-packed agenda. We looked back at our first five years in business, unveiled Symphony 2.0, and heard from partners and customers about how they’re innovating on the Symphony platform. 

By the numbers, it was our largest event ever – with more than 600 senior-level attendees and 45 customer and partner presentations. Innovate is growing into a premier community networking event for Global Markets. 

On the technology front, we announced “Elements” – a library of prepackaged software components for building interactive user interfaces. There are more than a thousand bots and applications in production on the platform today. The bots and applications we saw this year were, on the one hand, more natural and integrated – but also becoming more sophisticated with the addition of Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence.

Symphony is a collaboration platform, and at its core are conversational exchanges. This model is extending to human/machine interactions like the new trading assistant bot at NatWest Markets. “SCOUT is clever, has a personality, is keen, and is always right.” said John Smith of NatWest. We also heard about inter-firm machine-to-machine automation – humans kick off an interaction and counterparty bots work at lightning speed in the background to sort out the details. Very inspiring! 

These are the kind of workflows we built Symphony to facilitate. Seeing our customers live on stage was the perfect way to demonstrate the possibilities and to open Symphony’s next chapter. 

Software innovation has always aggregated on open platforms that achieve critical mass (think Windows or AWS). This year was a tipping point for Symphony. Engagement and innovation are accelerating. As we move into 2020, I cannot wait to see the things our ecosystem will invent.