Symphony Community Embraces Automation, Bots

Customers and Partners to Showcase New Workflow Integrations at Symphony Innovate Asia in Hong Kong

HONG KONG, 7 June, 2018 – Symphony Communication Services, LLC announces that its growing community of over 320 firms is using Symphony as a full workflow platform, investing resources to build customized bots, automated workflows and integrations to extend Symphony’s secure enterprise collaboration capabilities. Today, over half of Symphony’s enterprise customers operate bots within their Symphony platform. Globally, more than 500 unique bots have been developed by customers using Symphony’s open APIs since the SDK launch. Furthermore, Symphony customers plan to migrate over 2,500 existing bots from other communication platforms to Symphony in the coming months.

Many of these customer- and partner-developed workflows will be demoed live at Symphony’s flagship conference, Symphony Innovate Asia 2018, held in Hong Kong on the 7^th of June. Bots and automation reduce manual processing and resolve major workflow challenges currently faced by the financial services industry such as client onboarding, post-trade management and research distribution. These bots can integrate with third-party systems like news feeds, or internal research and data sources, while maintaining the same security and compliance inherent to the Symphony platform.

“Symphony enables and represents a community of innovators – including our customers and partners – together we are building the future of enterprise collaboration,” says David Gurlé, Symphony Founder and CEO. “We are thrilled that the majority of our enterprise customers have begun to embrace the possibilities that automation, bots and workflow provide and are using our open APIs to extend our collaboration platform. We believe that this is just the beginning of truly game-changing innovations coming to the financial services industry as it implements its digital agenda.”

“Concerto – a Natixis in-house bot – is equipping Symphony with a ‘one-stop-shop’ feature by re-engineering our front office force’s daily workflow. A tool that has a real business impact leads to enhanced internal efficiency and client engagement. We are now working on developing further this solution while plugging in automation, intelligence and more,” says Emmanuel Lefort, Head of Global Markets, APAC, Natixis.

“J.P. Morgan continues to expand bot workflow innovations on Symphony across the trade life-cycle. It is enabling new workflows that deliver an enhanced client experience, automation and efficiencies. The J.P. Morgan Markets Search Bot demonstrates the ability to access the latest pre-trade content through a one-click workflow from Symphony,” says Will Quan, Executive Director, CIB – Markets Execution, J.P. Morgan.

Symphony Innovation Award Winners

At Innovate Asia 2018, Symphony will announce the winners of its new Innovation Award, an honor bestowed upon Symphony customers and partners who transform legacy workflows by developing unique, innovative bots, applications or integrations for the platform. Winning entries all represent innovations live in production.

ANZ wins for its Trade Butler Bot, which automates the trade validation control for foreign exchange (FX) trades to make the process easier and more effective. Previously a manual process, the Symphony integrated bot solution delivers significant benefits in terms of operational risk mitigation and resource utilization.

“We are very excited to receive this award and particularly pleased to be recognised as one of the top innovators in the industry. We started our digital transformation journey with Symphony 12 months ago and it provides us with a great solution to the use of bot, AI and Machine Learning within our trade lifecycle workflow,” said Nicola Lanteri, Project Director Global Markets, ANZ.

“While we tested the platform with a specific use case, there is great potential for Symphony to streamlining other complex workflows which will significantly change the way we operate. We look forward to further exploring new use cases and unlocking the full capabilities of Symphony,” said Gianpaolo Mangiacasale, Director – Global Head of Markets Transaction Management & Controls, ANZ.

ipushpull wins for its offering which enables users to share the latest data from their external applications with other Symphony users without sharing files. By integrating with the secure Symphony Data Layer, ipushpull is able to deliver live data sharing while leveraging Symphony’s powerful security, encryption and access controls.

“The powerful combination of Symphony’s secure chat and ipushpull’s live data sharing, inter-operability and workflow management features have introduced a new paradigm in the way teams are able to interact and clients can be serviced,” says Matthew Cheung, CEO of ipushpull. “Where Symphony is replacing emails, ipushpull is replacing file sharing,” adds Cheung. “The innovation project took this concept one stage further by fully embedding ipushpull’s data sharing features into Symphony’s own secure messaging layer meaning seamless on-boarding and deployment of ipushpull for new and existing Symphony users.”

“We are excited to honor both ANZ and ipushpull with the Symphony Innovation Award for their outstanding developments which bring together many of the hallmarks of the Symphony vision: automation, community and streamlined workflow. These developments represent a major step in the mission to reduce manual processes within the financial services industry, and to integrate existing systems within the Symphony platform,” adds Gurlé.

Symphony Innovate Asia 2018 Partner Showcase

The Symphony Partner Program fosters an ecosystem of over 50 innovative companies who share a common goal of developing workflow and content applications and integrations to extend Symphony. These partners offer complementary business applications to Symphony’s platform, many of which will be showcased at Symphony Innovate Asia 2018:

BlueFire AI — BlueFire AI is an Intelligence Company for Capital Markets. Blue Fire AI curates & distills large information sets to create intelligence edge on 75k private / public companies from over 60 countries. These insights are used by Investment Banks, Assets Managers and Intermediaries for driving sales productivity, capturing asset performance or monetizing information. Blue Fire AI combines quantitative analytics on company fundamentals and security prices with machines powered by artificial intelligence that read and understand text (unstructured data) like capital markets experts.

Google Cloud — Portfolio of products, services and tools enabling customers to modernize their operations for today’s digital world. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offerings span storage, infrastructure, networking, data, analytics and app development, machine learning tools and APIs. GCP enables Symphony’s customers to scale globally with higher reliability and lower latency, while satisfying security and compliance requirements.

IHS Markit — The Markit Trade Manager integration enables buy-side users to manage trade exceptions directly from a Symphony conversation with a counterparty. Real-time collaboration integrated with MarkitSERV workflow allows trading teams to affirm transactions more efficiently, reducing operational risk and increasing operational alpha.

ipushpull — ipushpull, winner of the Symphony Innovation Award, improves workflow efficiency by allowing secure live data sharing and collaboration between Symphony and desktop applications such as Excel, databases and internal systems. By sharing data instead of sharing files, data is live and interoperable cross application while eliminating file sharing, static data, cutting & pasting and manual processes.

LamBots— Started by a former Symphony employee, LamBots is an application and bot development agency in Singapore that has helped several financial institutions turn their productivity enhancing ideas into working bots and applications on the Symphony Platform quickly and cost-effectively.

Nikkei — Nikkei Inc. is a media organization with newspaper publishing at its core. Established in 1876, The Nikkei has become world’s largest financial paper, which has nearly three million subscribers. Also, Nikkei welcomed The Financial Times into its group in 2015. Nikkei’s multi-platform media distribution also includes online, broadcast, magazines and financial data vending services. Nikkei 225, a stock market index for the Tokyo Stock Exchange, has been calculated by the Nikkei for decades.

QUICK — Since its founding in 1971, QUICK has developed an information infrastructure that supports Japan’s securities and financial markets. QUICK’s mission is to support the decision making of a wide range of customers, from securities firms and financial institutions to institutional investors, corporations and individual investors. QUICK delivers high-value-added global market information from a fair and impartial perspective. QUICK is headquartered in Tokyo, with offices in Osaka, Nagoya, Fukuoka, London and Hong Kong.

Smartkarma — Smartkarma is the world’s premier research network connecting institutional investors to a community of world-leading independent research providers and a wealth of investment research. Smartkarma’s focus areas of coverage are often under-covered by traditional research providers including emerging markets, small and mid-caps, and in-depth event-driven and IPO analysis. Headquartered in Singapore, Smartkarma is Asia’s largest provider of investment research with offices in Hong Kong, London, Frankfurt and New York.

Thomson Reuters — Thomson Reuters Eikon delivers unparalleled and easy access to trusted news, data, and analytics; instant connection to new and emerging markets, deep and varied pools of liquidity and professional networks. Eikon subscribers can now share its world leading content as part of their Symphony workflow to enhance collaboration, discover more opportunities and make crucial decisions with confidence.

*Sponsor of Symphony Innovate, pending member of the Symphony Partner Program.

About Symphony

Symphony transforms the way users communicate effectively and securely with a single workflow application. Forging a new path in the industry, Symphony is designed to help individuals, teams and organizations of all sizes improve productivity, while meeting complex data security and regulatory compliance needs. Symphony was founded in October 2014 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, with offices in New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Stockholm, Sophia-Antipolis and London.

For more information, visit www.symphony.com and connect with Symphony on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Media Contact

Katherine Kilpatrick, Director of Corporate Communications

[email protected], 650.262.1563