Celebrating 10 Years of Symphony: Leading the Way in Fintech
Symphony turns 10! Discover how we’re transforming the financial industry through trust, passion, and cutting-edge technology.
For Symphony, the beginning of the new decade arrives just as we’re crossing the halfway point of our company’s first ten years. A few months ago at our Innovate conference, our CEO David Gurlé spoke about the challenges facing global markets over the next five years. He touched on the complexity and fragmentation of financial markets, lack of standards, legacy infrastructure, shrinking margins, and the constant burden of regulations.
Our challenge for the next five years and beyond is to evolve the Symphony platform to support our customers as they navigate these issues. As we prepare to launch Symphony 2.0, we are not only monitoring the global finance vertical, but also developments in leading workplace collaboration platforms. Here’s a short preview of three trends we anticipate for 2020:
Collaboration across company lines
Businesses will require workplace collaboration platforms that function across organizations; the ability to chat and share workflows with internal colleagues is already the baseline. Workers need the same capabilities in their interactions with partners and customers. Email has this kind of universal reach but lacks security, extensibility and the efficiency of modern collaboration tools. Top SAAS providers are already demonstrating the value of providing APIs and automation capabilities that function between businesses. Box is a great example. Furthermore, B2B interactions will require standardized schema and data models.
Businesses with B2C interests will need to connect with consumer-centric platforms in order to reach the large pools of customers and prospects who are active in those communities. Our recent integration with WeChat is an example of how Symphony is evolving to address this demand.
Workplace collaboration tools customized by industry
Like other verticals, firms in Global Markets have industry-specific needs. Specialization will be critical for effective collaboration, especially in B2B markets. As we predicted last year, SAAS consolidation is happening. With fewer choices and less specialization in mass-market offerings, vertical markets will demand better fit to their specific needs. This creates opportunity for sector-specific solutions that generic platforms can’t offer.
Increased cloud adoption and accompanying security risks
As an increasing number of large enterprises opt into cloud-based technology solutions and tools, their security risks are shifting outside the boundaries of their proprietary systems. The compelling economics of the cloud makes this migration inevitable. This means handing a large part of the security practice to vendors who operate there. In 2020, businesses will be looking to partner with cloud-based collaboration platforms that offer more than procedural security – so we will hear more about end-to-end encryption, key management, confidential computing, and enclaves.
These are just a few of the trends we’ll be watching closely in the coming year. We have big plans for 2020, and we look forward to working with our customers and partners to bring them to life in the new decade.
Symphony turns 10! Discover how we’re transforming the financial industry through trust, passion, and cutting-edge technology.
FDC3 aims to simplify communication between different financial applications. Traditionally, traders juggle multiple displays, manually transferring data. FDC3 enables automatic context sharing between these applications, saving time and reducing errors. Common uses span from pre-trade to post-trade activities.
Symphony, a member of the open-source foundation FINOS, is deeply involved in developing FDC3 and promoting its use in global capital markets. Our focus is standardizing integration APIs, giving customers flexibility in choosing their Desktop Integration Platform provider while supporting FDC3.
The 2020s are an unprecedented decade of disruption and every market participant is either the disruptor…or the disrupted. Today, we stand at the precipice of artificial general intelligence and every well-run organization should be actively seeking to disrupt themselves right now. Symphony has been able to remain almost a decade ahead of disruption by understanding one simple truth—thriving through disruption. This demands three things from your technology: resiliency, stability and flexibility.