All the pieces fit: connecting trader voice and messaging across workflows

Last June, financial messaging and collaboration platform Symphony announced its acquisition of Cloud9 Technologies, a voice solutions and trading turrets provider. The acquisition was the first of two (Symphony announced its plans to buy StreetLinx, a counterparty mapping platform, in August 2021) that appeared to signal a new era for the provider under new its chief executive, Brad Levy.  

“This isn’t Symphony, the messaging app anymore,” says Michael Lynch, Symphony’s chief product officer.

It would appear that’s true. Since Levy took hold of the company, it has piloted an ID service for know-your-customer requirements using Web3 technology, and it’s now looking for ways to reimagine the industry’s workflows incorporating voice and telephone usage, as Levy told WatersTechnology at Symphony Innovate New York in October.

Another pillar in the firm’s agenda is what Symphony is calling Instant Voice, or the ability for its users to dial and connect with their contacts at the push of a button, and compliant templates that will allow clients to be reached through their preferred applications, such as WhatsApp and WeChat. Its rapid rollout of new products and services are meant to bolster its “omnichannel strategy” to bring together the many different communication avenues traders, operations, and back-office personnel may employ.

Prior to the acquisition, Symphony and Cloud9 were competitors in the same comms and collaboration game. Cloud9’s offering centered around voice communication, while Symphony had been focused on chat and, to a lesser extent, video. With both having the luxury of agility that’s afforded to modern tech companies, they each boasted end-to-end encryption and cloud-based service.

“When the Cloud9 and Symphony acquisition was being considered, it was very obvious that these were two very aligned companies and product offerings with the same goal in place of trying to disrupt the way the market communicates,” Lynch says. The outstanding problem Symphony did not have a solution for was the disconnected nature of the legacy trading turret.  

“Trader voice and the physical hardware of the legacy turret was wholly and completely separate from all other workflows, and communication and decision-making flows that our customers had,” Lynch says. “We can make the life of the classic trader voice customer better—i.e., the trader, the salesperson, the broker—but we can also start to introduce trader voice type capabilities to new audiences.” Those new audiences Symphony is attempting to reach include research, operations, and risk teams who sometimes also need connectivity to trading desks as markets move.  

A turret or dealer board is a telephony system used by traders at their respective trading desks. It’s similar to a modern desk phone, but turrets offer additional features, such as the ability to prioritize calls, handle large call volumes, and instantly make calls. Most trading volumes were once conducted through phone trading, but the introduction of electronic trading has moved large swaths of trading activity to software-based platforms across asset classes. 

While Covid-19 forced the world into remote work practically overnight, the methods teams use to communicate had already begun changing. Roughly two months before cities locked themselves down, the UK’s Brexit had splintered trading businesses with multiple offices in the European Union, particularly any with a trading desk in London.

“This is a market that needs familiarity,” Lynch said at Innovate. “They’re not going to go from a turret to software, day zero. We need to be able to bring that market and change that behavior but give them comfort and give them that need to connect via the button.” 

One would need only to connect the hardware device to their computer via USB without a telephony line or power cord. “It’s not dissimilar from your mouse or your keyboard, you now have a hardware phone that is connected to the software,” Lynch tells WatersTechnology.

The compliance conundrum

There are hundreds of different methods, platforms, and applications for market counterparties to talk to each other when they need to. But for all its optionality, the comms space is treacherous. Firms have to weigh how much they’re willing to pay for these services, which are necessary but not exactly revenue-generating, and they have to decide how much risk they’re willing to take on under regulators’ eyes. 

In late September, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced charges against 16 firms across Wall Street for what the regulator called “widespread recordkeeping failures” in maintaining and preserving electronic communications. The resulting penalty totaled $1.1 billion across firms that included the broker-dealer units of Barclays, Bank of America, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and UBS.  

The September fines followed news in December 2021 that JP Morgan Securities was fined by both the SEC and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for a total of $200 million for allowing employees to use WhatsApp and other messaging platforms for business purposes on personal devices. SEC officials cited the failure of the firm to record and keep those conversations as a violation of federal laws that left the regulator unaware of conversations between brokers and clients. 

Regulators outside of the United States have also set their sights on platforms like WhatsApp. Bloomberg reported in October that the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority had put in information requests to firms that included Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, and Nomura about the use of messaging apps but that a full-scale investigation had not yet been initiated.

As an expansion on the federated messaging capabilities available through Symphony, the provider has also rolled out templates on Symphony Chat that allow users to interact with customers through their preferred communication channels. Users can send messages through Symphony that reach clients on WhatsApp, while staying compliant by capturing and retaining those conversations. Lynch says the ability can move conversations that would have originally flowed through email to more direct forms of communication.  

A September report by the Financial Times outlined the cumbersome ways some institutions mandated messages to be preserved, including Goldman Sachs requiring employees to take pictures of messages received on a personal device and then forward them to compliance for preservation.  

Symphony has also announced a partnership with mobile compliance provider Umony that will see the company extend to capture around mobile voice and text. Two solutions will be brought to market: one known as “bring your own device” and the other centered on connectivity through mobile carriers.  

The BYOD offering, accessed through the Symphony app, would give users access to a second number where they can be reached for both texts and calls. Through the in-network solution, users with a corporate device would have conversations captured by the carrier.