Symphony blog

A new report reveals a growing need for centralized communication platforms in finance and insurance. Firms face mounting regulatory fines, seeking efficiency and compliance through channel aggregation.

Amenity revists ESG themes that were selected as “must watch” at the start of 2023. We take a look at how extensively the themes were featured in news, earnings calls, and SEC filings over the year, as well as which companies’ activities best captured those themes.

Today’s financial workflows are becoming increasingly complex due to the competing pressures of new technology leading to faster execution and the need to ensure that all actions and communications are compliant. In order to keep up with these workflows, the involved participants must become more efficient.

We’ve previously explored a rebounding of supply chain sentiment in the consumer staples sector (using our ESG dataset) after a lengthy, pandemic-fueled decline. This week, our Key Drivers dataset reveals a potential turnaround for margin sentiment, which has taken hits across the consumer retail space since Q1 of 2022.

Global supply chain issues that began in 2021 continued to dominate the news in 2022, but a closer analysis with our ESG platform’s Supply Chain data reveals some sectors are rebounding when compared to last year, particularly the Consumer Staples sector. We take a closer look at the supply chain theme to explore what companies in this sector and other sectors are experiencing.

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.”

Recently the EU signed the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) regulation. This legislation opens the door to competitors that may not have an economies of scale advantage, but may be able to utilize a low-carbon advantage to become more competitive. Our NLP highlights which major companies in the Materials and Industrials sector are set up to compete in the EU’s new low carbon environment.

We live in a fast-evolving age of information, where Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are starting to be used in many areas like financial decision-making and