Read CEO Brad Levy’s Financial Times Adviser article on communication regulation
  • Products
  • Insights
  • Company
  • Support
  • Contact Us

University FinTech Challenge Winners!

  • OLIVIER POUPENEY
  • Tech4Fin

Last week we concluded the Symphony U: Fintech Challenge – a Symphony programming competition held for university students across the United States. The goal of this competition was to give an opportunity to the participants to leverage Symphony Bots to build financial workflows and address real use cases, get free access to the Symphony Bot Developer Certification program, and gain hands-on coding experience with the platform that powers Financial Services.

The Challenge

At the end of 2020, Symphony in collaboration with our partners launched the Symphony U: Fintech Challenge. Students were able to enroll via: https://goto.symphony.com/Symphony-U-Fintech-Challenge-overview.html , and had three months to go through the Symphony developer training program, become a Symphony Certified Bot Developer, build a bot and submit their source code plus a 10-minute demo video that outlines their proposed solution. Teams selected as finalists had the opportunity to digitally pitch their bot solution to a panel of industry experts within Symphony and across our existing partners and co-hosts. The winning team was given interview opportunities for internships at Symphony and other participating partners.

We’d like to thank our great external panel of judges who reviewed all entries and made a decision on the winning team:

  • Abraham Ouano: Head of Finance Architect & Innovation, Citigroup – Finance Transformation Office
  • Michael Lynch: Vice President, Head of Digital Workplace Product Management, Goldman Sachs
  • Mike Scannell: Vice President, Digital Strategy, Barclays

And the winner is...

Symphony would like to congratulate the winning team – students from Muhlenberg College – Derek Levine, Ethan Ruoff and Jonathan Maron, who developed the Portfolio Management Bot. This Symphony Bot provides portfolio managers a seamless solution to monitor portfolio performance and allocate trades across different portfolios under management.

About the problem (and solution)

Portfolio Managers need to seamlessly allocate block trades to different client stock accounts under management.

Business Pain Points:

  • PMs must manually update clients about portfolio changes
  • Clients want real-time portfolio analytics
  • PMs can’t bring portfolio updates/data info conversational context

The Team built a Symphony Bot that:

  • Allows PMs to easily allocate block trades
  • Allows clients to analyze portfolio performance based on a user query
  • Allows PMs and clients to add insights on portfolio data in a conversational context

You can watch the BerGot short demo video here.

What’s next?

We aim to repeat the same event this fall in the EMEA region. Stay tuned.

You may also like
Tech4Fin

Symphony and Solving the ‘Off-Channel Communication’ Conundrum

As the landscape of communication continues to evolve in our increasingly digital world, the financial services industry is feeling the pinch of regulatory scrutiny. In recent years, financial firms have faced nearly $2 billion in penalties from the SEC and CFTC due to unregulated “off-channel” messaging. This surge in “off-channel” communication, including usage of platforms such as WhatsApp, WeChat, SMS, LINE, and mobile calls, is largely fueled by the rise of hybrid work. Yet, regulators maintain that all business communications must be monitored, auditable, and occur only within official channels. In the words of SEC Chair Gary Gensler, “As technology changes, it’s even more important that registrants appropriately conduct their communications about business matters within only official channels. And they must maintain and preserve those communications.”

August 3, 2023
Tech4Fin

US Next-Day Settlement: The Clock Ticks Closer to T+1 for Europe and the UK

Almost a decade ago, Europe led the way in shortening the settlement cycle to T+2 – a task that required wholesale re-engineering of European market-structure. Mere months from now, European securities firms will again be challenged – this time with the move to US NEXT-DAY settlement. Once more, our market participants face a complete restructuring of entire organisational workflows.

May 25, 2023
Back to Blogs