At the end of last year, we introduced SymBot: the first Symphony bot built specifically to provide automated support to Symphony users. I couldn’t be more proud of the team – while improving the Symphony user experience was our top priority and primary goal for SymBot, the bot also serves the important function of demonstrating core capabilities and strengths of the Symphony platform.
At the dawn of 2021, Symphony launched a new version of its Bot Developer Kit, the BDK 2.0. This toolkit provides the same support as Symphony’s existing SDKs for basic features such as datafeed handling and API bindings but simplifies many aspects like configuration, authentication, real-time events, and message templating. It also includes new advanced features like the Activities API as well as optional framework integration for Spring Boot developers.
The ability to find information and the answer to any question at an instant is standard today. We’re accustomed to finding everything we want to know with one click, or a question to our virtual assistant. So how do we take that expectation and translate this to Symphony? The need for content discovery to work seamlessly and quickly while keeping our customer data secure at the same time is a tall order, but I am thrilled to say we’ve done that and more.
What happened over the past few weeks was what I term a “magma moment” in the financial markets. Reddit. WallStreetBets. GameStop. And more. Something molten and disruptive erupted and will change the landscape of the financial markets as it now turns igneous. The market volatility and agility were on full display. But the financial operations teams in the middle and back office were the ones who truly felt the heat and pain. More accounts to onboard, more transactions needing to ensure settlement. It all meant longer hours, more pressure and duress added to existing stresses. Exacerbated by disconnected and tedious manual processes in both client lifecycle and transaction lifecycle management. We just saw market fundamentals disrupted in real-time. But…there is a parallel (and more positive) disruption required to transform client onboarding and post transaction processes. It needs to happen. And soon. Think: augmented operations. Human-centric collaboration technology, automated workflows that dramatically reduce (someday even eliminate) the email/phone/fax productivity death loop.
Since introducing Symphony 2.0, we’ve shared blogs on a few different elements of the product: from the accompanying mobile app, to the guiding principles of its development, to new features like workspaces. We’ve noted before that user input, feedback and usage data played a significant role in shaping Symphony 2.0. Recently, we hosted a webinar to share these user insights and show the Symphony community why we built 2.0 the way we did–as well as demo some of the features inspired by customer feedback:
GreenKey Technologies recently competed in Symphony’s New York Hackathon where they won the Most Cutting Edge Workflow award for their GK Research Bot, created to help increase efficiency between sell-side and buy-side research teams.