From rare earths to magnets, autonomous agents powering drones, Crypto Bros and quantum entanglements, today’s headlines all sound complicated, spooky, and even down right scary. The reality is that a lot of change is happening in a short time, making many of us quite uncomfortable and creating great uncertainty for all.
In financial services, we stand at a pivotal moment, asking the fundamental question: “How do we refactor, reform, and rebuild as we dematerialize, digitize, and disrupt all markets?” The answer lies in the convergence of three critical emerging technologies—ledgers, tokens and bots (oh my!!!)—which are rapidly shaping the future and enabling a greater understanding of the past. These technologies are set to join together quickly in the coming years and represent powerful forces shaping the future.
The relevant macro arc we are currently navigating is the 4th Industrial Revolution – also dubbed the Age of Accelerations – an era defined by technological, biological and global collisions and convergences. Over the next three to five years, we will see a rapid acceleration of a new stack composed of programmable chains and ledgers, smart contracts and tokens, and autonomous bots and agents. These innovations will emerge under, over, around and through the current technological stacks, effectively serving to connect legacy systems to these new pathways.
To succeed in this environment, we must build systems that are inherently Distributed (for improved efficiency), Confidential (for enhanced security), and rely on an Agent network (for increased scalability). All of these mirror innovations that the team at Symphony is building and deploying to customers.
This is the future: programmable chains are the new stack, and ledgers will evolve quickly in parallel to existing systems. Programmable ledgers will interact with smart contracts, which themselves will evolve with agentic flows. This dynamic interaction creates new pathways for value and process, acting either as temporary bridges to the future or as more permanent pathways that dilute existing steps by design. Native Digital assets and liabilities, along with real world asset digital tokens and twins, will evolve to move through these flows more specifically, securely and seamlessly.
The same way your brain reprograms pathways as you learn a new hobby (like yoga, or piano, or French) – our collective network “brain” is developing new routes to accommodate these new skills.
This technological foundation fundamentally changes how work gets done. Traditional batch processes will transition to near real-time, ensuring that risk and models are always current, with the built-in ability to rewind and audit historical states. We have moved from a 9-5, 5 day a week market to flows operating close to 24 hours a day/6.5 days a week. Future actions will be driven less through direct application use and more through actionable data presented as alerts designed to hone in critical tasks to move the process forward. As flows become better defined, humans and autonomous agents will increasingly blend their work.
This is a natural extension of the trusted identity which the Symphony Directory provides, making it the verifiable foundation for this new automated economy.
This evolution begins incrementally, focusing first on trusted networks utilizing pristine data and outcomes that are easily determined. Then, existing and unnecessary steps will be diluted and removed as processes reshape how work is done and assets/liabilities traverse the system.
The ability to scale is set for a dramatic increase, enabling organizations to do 10 to 1000s of times more work with the same resources within the next 3-5 years. This is just the start; even larger leaps are expected, driven by meaningful advancements in the energy of technology (making the cost of computation more economical) and how that energy combines with compute power and predictive models (equalling improvements in AI model reasoning).
We are truly in the middle of a massive temporal shift. If we look at the period from the year 2000 to 2050, we are at halftime. During this span, we are experiencing a 10x compression of time, leading to 100x change—and critically, the rate of change is still increasing. This merging of ledgers, tokens, and bots is projected to both mature rapidly and converge by the year 2030.
I see this as a positive force for change. Though incremental at first, the movement is accelerating and clearly upward sloping. By following the “yellow brick road” guided by Ledgers, Tokens and Bots, we can navigate complex challenges, unlock unprecedented opportunities, and forge a path toward groundbreaking innovations in financial services.
Better. Cheaper. Faster.
And as always, with security first!
The ability to scale is set for a dramatic increase, enabling organizations to do 10 to 1000s of times more work with the same resources within the next 3-5 years. This is just the start; even larger leaps are expected, driven by meaningful advancements in the energy of technology (making the cost of computation more economical) and how that energy combines with compute power and predictive models (equalling improvements in AI model reasoning).
We are truly in the middle of a massive temporal shift. If we look at the period from the year 2000 to 2050, we are at halftime. During this span, we are experiencing a 10x compression of time, leading to 100x change—and critically, the rate of change is still increasing. This merging of ledgers, tokens, and bots is projected to both mature rapidly and converge by the year 2030.
I see this as a positive force for change. Though incremental at first, the movement is accelerating and clearly upward sloping. By following the “yellow brick road” guided by Ledgers, Tokens and Bots, we can navigate complex challenges, unlock unprecedented opportunities, and forge a path toward groundbreaking innovations in financial services.
Better. Cheaper. Faster.
And as always, with security first!
Brad Levy, CEO, and Michael Lynch, COO, recently joined Trader TV to share insights on the evolving landscape of financial markets. In a series of interviews Symphony and Trader TV delve into key trends shaping the industry, from the increasing demand for interoperability to the transformative potential of agentic AI and cloud adoption.
To support customers managing off-channel communications compliance, we are expanding our provider network to include the leading digital communications governance and archiving (DCGA) providers for financial services communication data. This strategic initiative strengthens Symphony’s commitment to provide clients with enhanced flexibility and choice in managing their critical communication data.
Secure communication is in the spotlight, or rather the lack of secure communication. Media headlines about security breaches, cyber attacks, and compromised business and personal data are starting to become the new normal… and that shouldn’t be the case. A new level of concern arises when industries that are critical to the economy such as financial services, healthcare or travel are impacted.