The non-compliant use of messaging platforms has led to billions in regulatory fines. Symphony helps enable seamless compliant messaging with clients via WhatsApp, WeChat and SMS
Enable surveillance and recordkeeping of clients’ preferred messaging platforms
Enable maintenance of SMS communication records for regulatory compliance
The only fully open, scalable, and secure collaboration platform purpose-built for global markets – enabling efficient workflows and compliant communication
Suite of modular collaboration capabilities accelerates communication
Leverage Symphony’s capabilities in your platforms and portals
Secure, compliance-enabling framework meets the stringent needs of markets
Compliance-enabling and scalable voice technology maximizes efficiency by defragmenting communication and connecting traders and trader-adjacent teams instantly
Eliminate communication silos and provide instant voice connectivity
Cross-organizational solution native to Symphony and built for speed
Trader-adjacent connectivity with global intercom across internal teams
Full-featured turret replacement with maximum external connectivity
Facilitate productivity, collaboration and effective co-working with leading video conferencing platforms integrated alongside Symphony chats and rooms
Keep collaborating in Symphony while joining or hosting Zoom meetings
Retain Symphony workflow context during Teams Video meetings
Connect your everyday systems to Symphony to improve efficiency, reduce context switching and mitigate manual tasks
Enterprise software bi-directionally integrated with Symphony
415+ apps and 2K+ bots to help streamline and automate workflows
Since Symphony’s inception, it has been the company’s mission to promote a strong ecosystem of innovation by our customers and partners on the platform. As a result, we have taken an open API approach which benefits our end users as it fosters deep integrations and novel workflows. In the spirit of fostering open standards and interoperability to empower our community, I am pleased to share that we will support the FDC3 standard, and plan to extend its open source interface in order to offer more versatile integrations between desktop applications and Symphony. The richer FDC3 API will offer an array of options for streamlining and enhancing new and existing collaboration workflows for professionals in the financial industry.
This announcement coincides with a reiteration of our support of open source, FINOS and its mission, the organization committed to defining and developing open source standards for the financial services industry. I am honored to have been named to its board and we look forward to participating in more open source projects in the coming years.
A bit of background: FDC3 (which stands for Financial Desktop Connectivity and Collaboration Consortium) is an open standard for desktop integration in the financial industry. FDC3 implementations offer a relatively easy way for financial companies, where desktop real estate is a challenge, to achieve a much more integrated workflow on the desktop across new and legacy applications. FDC3 implementations can lower development costs for certain types of integrations and reduce time to market. Currently the FDC3 standard offers a somewhat limited interface or definitions of intents and contexts for integrating applications with chat and collaboration platforms. We have engaged with the FDC3 community and FINOS to define a richer interface based on real use cases and customer requirements, and we intend to expand the standard to a broader usage beyond the desktop applications.
Security and compliance have been at the core of the Symphony platform since its inception, setting the highest security standards for the financial industry. Symphony’s end-to-end encryption model has been the driving force behind the company’s extensibility and integration strategy with customers having full control over when and how their data flows in and out of Symphony.
In line with our existing extensibility and integration strategy, Symphony will continue to uphold our principles for security and compliance as we work to support an extended and improved FDC3 compliant interface for desktop integrations. We will work with FDC3 providers to offer additional controls to our customers to configure and fine tune the level of integration and context sharing between applications in accordance with security and compliance requirements.
We envision Symphony as the connective tissue between systems and desktop applications for data driven collaboration between internal and external parties. To achieve our vision Symphony will continue to offer different integration and platform extensibility options to make delivery of new and innovative solutions easier and faster. Specifically we will:
With heavy contribution from our clients and partners, we are in the process of finalizing a list of most impactful desktop integration use cases. The use cases range from being able to create a room, stage or send a message in Symphony from a trusted application to more complex scenarios where a user might be able to extract a context (i.e. post trade details ) in a structured format from a Symphony chat message with a single click and send it to another application for further processing. Also as we work to integrate Cloud9 and StreetLinx with the Symphony platform, we will identify features offered by these products that we can potentially expose via an FDC3 interface.
We continue to improve and expand the way our customers and partners can build and deploy platform extensions and integrations. By offering both server side and desktop APIs, we look to empower our clients and partners with the right set of tools to continue adding value and optimizations to the collaboration process. In the future, we will provide more specific details about our plan to enable the Symphony desktop client for desktop interoperability with FDC3. If you would like to discuss extensibility and/or integration strategy, I’d welcome the discussion.
More than ever before, business success depends upon an organization’s ability to communicate quickly and effectively. It’s clear that the “workplace” has radically changed. This new landscape demands three things from every company’s communication tools:
In December of 2021, SIFMA, ICI and DTCC called for the shortening of the settlement cycle in the U.S. financial markets from T+2 (transaction date plus two days) to T+1 (transaction date plus one day) within the first half of 2024. Their report indicates that accelerating the settlement process will “reduce risks and costs for the industry while building upon the benefits achieved in the successful move to T+2 in 2017.” This is in line with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s announcement on Feb 9, 2022 of a proposed rule to shorten the standard settlement cycle for most broker-dealer transactions from two business days after the trade date (“T+2″) to one business day after the trade date (“T+1″), while soliciting comments regarding challenges and possible approaches to achieving settlement by the end of trade date (“T+0″).
In our journey building an event mesh, we face the challenge of reconciling with Symphony’s engineering history. Specifically, we are transitioning from a single-tenant, monolithic architecture to a multi-tenant, microservice architecture. And critically, due to the nature of our business, this shift must be both progressive and smooth.
