2025 – what a year! Symphony’s focus remained on secure communication, providing our more than 1,400 customers around the world with a platform and community to conduct business securely, in innovative ways without compromising on compliance, while leveraging the growing impact of agentic AI into their workflows.
For Symphony connectivity is at the core of our everyday work. The firm’s federation business continued its growth across geographies and industries. Symphony’s product for WhatsApp, SMS and LINE, grew 34% in active users and 23% in messages sent, both YoY. Symphony Messaging, the platform that powers our federation offering, expanded its reach as new logos in insurance and wealth joined the community.
On the trader voice front, we saw a double-digit growth in the number of firms adopting our cloud native product Cloud9, and an increase in active users of 14% as we continue to help firms move away from legacy private wire and on-prem technology. Legacy technology risk remains a real challenge amongst our customer base. As the modernization of the industry continues to progress, Symphony chose to power that mobility and flexibility further with the introduction of its Cloud9 mobile app – now being leveraged by global trading organizations – at Innovate 2025, which took place in London. As the firm’s CEO and president, Ben Chrnelich, told financial journalist Lucy McNulty in a Following the Rules podcast: “Symphony is committed to investing in the innovation of trader voice beyond phone calls to drive a secure communications platform with the ability to harvest data, information and analytics.” More to come on this in 2026.
Validation of our impact in the market came in many forms. Symphony won seven industry awards – a record for the firm – and two leadership recognitions, from the likes of WatersTechnology, A-Team Group, TabbFORUM and FinTech Global. While research firm Chartis included Symphony as a Communications Monitoring System – Best of Breed in their Surveillance Platform Solutions 2025: Quadrant Update. Also, the expertise of our team was highlighted through regular contributions to media publications around the world, on topics that ranged from trading technology, compliance, agentic AI and quantum to our growing footprint in Belfast.
The investment in our people continued with global emerging talent programs and hiring. Symphony furthered its long standing commitment with training, skills development, volunteering and other opportunities.
Since our expansion to Belfast, Northern Ireland in May 2024, we have grown that office to 45 professionals in engineering, information security, product, human resources, finance and marketing, and expect at least a 50% increase by the end of this year. Symphony’s membership to Software NI highlights our dedication to the local technology and finance ecosystem.
Looking at the year ahead, there is plenty to be excited about.
As the firm’s model for software-as-a-service (SaaS) evolves, we expect to see more customers leverage Symphony’s confidential cloud and compute offering – which uses Google Cloud Confidential Space and FIPS 140-2 Level 3 compliant Cloud Hardware Security Modules (HSM) – to control their data off-prem while allowing them to leverage AI in a fully secure environment.
On the AI front, evolving bot capabilities and new agentic workflows are on the horizon. COO Michael Lynch told A-Team Insight: “You will increasingly see agent-to-agent interaction. We have bot-to-bot conversations happening on Symphony today… Agents will have flexibility, but guardrails will ensure they only have flexibility within lanes that are well-defined by both providers and technology.” Our ambition is for Symphony’s new AI agent studio to empower developers with tools to configure and deploy artificial intelligence without compromising on control and compliance.
Symphony’s federation offering will expand to leverage WhatsApp Voice further and will include call recording, flexible archiving and storage, security and encryption. Client testing will start shortly with a full release in Q2.
And last but not least, please save the date for Innovate 2026 on May 6th in New York. The team will showcase the latest in our product offering as well as the innovation taking place within the Symphony community and platforms. We promise live demos, high impact networking and super interesting conversations.
If you have any questions about any of the topics above, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team. You can reach me on Symphony, LinkedIn or by emailing [email protected].
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.
In 2024, Symphony celebrated 10 years of supporting financial services firms drive innovation, efficiency and security as it evolved into a communications and markets technology firm. With interconnected platforms for messaging, voice, directory and analytics, and a growing community of 1,300+ institutions and 600,000+ users around the world, Symphony has established itself as the most valued financial services community.
Symphony is now in its tenth year of developing secure and compliant communications technology for global financial market participants. With over 500,000 users and more than 1300 firms using Symphony solutions, our industry relevance [and reliance] is widely recognized by clients, partners, regulators and journalists.