Sycomore Asset Management is rolling out a series of customized workspaces to its analysts and portfolio managers to support the firm’s thematic environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing strategies, leveraging Symphony Communication Services’ collaboration platform and FinTech Studios’ Apollo app.

The Symphony–FinTech Studios service will become the French firm’s central platform for communications between business areas, and for providing internal users with custom-filtered thematic content to support investment decisions.

Sycomore originally started using Symphony around five years ago—initially because it liked the option of having a mobile app in addition to a desktop interface. The firm’s analysts and portfolio managers relied heavily on mobile tools because they spent so much time out of the office with clients and meeting with companies. In fact, even before the Covid-19 pandemic, only about 20% of those staff would be in the office at any one time.

Now, three quarters of Sycomore’s portfolio managers and analysts are active Symphony users, and 62% use the mobile app to access intelligence generated from the firm’s trading operations. In total, 42 of Sycomore’s 75 employees use it, with non-users falling into operations, middle and back office, compliance and sales roles.

Over the same five-year period during which Sycomore has been using Symphony, its business has separately undergone significant growth and transformation. Five years ago, the firm managed funds worth €3.5 billion (~$4 billion). Now that figure is €10 billion. And during the past two years, its investments—previously very European-focused—have become more global. Two years ago, only 5% of its money was in US-based investments. Today, that figure is 20%.

In those first five years, Sycomore developed and deployed 20 bots under an umbrella platform dubbed Syco-bot. As an example, one tool links its execution management system and its portfolio management system, allowing it to provide staff with updates on order progress and alerts on execution status, and another that automates the approval process for rolling over orders at the end of each month. The asset manager plans to roll out another 10 bots over the next two years.

But the heart of the second stage of Sycomore’s efforts is a suite of workflow views developed for the firm by New York-based FinTech Studios that will make Symphony the central communication hub between Sycomore’s portfolio managers and its trading desk. In many cases, this function would be performed by well-known data and technology vendors. But that’s not always viable for a firm the size of Sycomore.

“We’re an independent boutique, so we need to manage our costs. So, for example, we don’t want to deploy 30 Bloombergs,” says Thomas Gourragne, head of trading at Sycomore in Paris. “What we want to deploy now is a tool that goes beyond what we’ve done on the trading side but with the same mindset, so that for every step of each duty a portfolio manager or analyst has to perform, they have a centralized workspace with filtered information and bots to manage their workflows.”

While Sycomore has been working with Symphony for five years, the deal with FinTech Studios came together within the last five months. “They found us quickly, and we got the deal done quickly,” says FinTech Studios founder and CEO Jim Tousignant. “My recollection is that a Symphony salesperson introduced us because Sycomore was looking for someone who could do what we do.”

Specifically, the vendor’s Apollo platform allows users to create unlimited numbers of channels dedicated to specific strategies, themes or funds, which can monitor and filter news and combine it with market data in dashboards, relationship graphs and charts to provide a highly focused stream of information on a topic or company. Users can create their own channels, and can decide how granular they want the filters on each channel to be, as well as what data and sources—for example, specific news or social media sources—to include or exclude. They can also share their channels—and the information they contain—with other colleagues or investors who also use Symphony, and because all the news provided via Apollo is tagged with detailed metadata, other users can then use that metadata to follow the same topics.

“So you can build your own intelligence system to track all the companies in your portfolio, and you can share that with other areas, applications and bots, or individuals on Symphony,” Tousignant says. Sycomore’s analysts and portfolio managers have already created more than 40 channels dedicated to providing filtered information on specific investment themes. “They can now monitor themes and markets that were previously too time-consuming, or where they may have been missing entry or exit points. All research on a company is critical in fast-moving markets.”

In January, Sycomore will roll out five dedicated workspaces for all its analysts and portfolio managers, powered by FinTech Studios, which Gourragne calls “our mini-Bloomberg”. These include workspaces covering trading; funds, which provides a news flow related to their workflow; risk management, which shows exposures and positions, targets reached, and trading patterns; a thematic workspace that monitors the web and social media for themes and trends; and a communications workspace, which will integrate videoconferencing platform Zoom into Symphony and will also leverage Symphony’s recent acquisition of institutional contact directory StreetLinx to provide dedicated links to its research providers.

“As an ESG specialist, our challenge is to stay ahead of the competition now that everyone is doing this. So our funds have become more and more thematic. And as a result, we have to suck in more data than before, but filter it,” Gourragne says. “With Fintech Studios, we can set up very precise ESG and thematical filters.”

While Fintech Studios supplies the level of thematic and filtered data that the firm finds most relevant—not just direct data about a company, but other factors identified by the vendor that can affect a company—Sycomore’s bots then play a crucial role integrating the data directly into the firm’s valuation models, instead of users manually having to capture datasets such as Twitter sentiment data before they can use it internally.

Marie Vallaeys, an ESG specialist at Sycomore, says that the initial versions will serve common needs across all user types, before then offering more tailored tools. “Each portfolio manager will use tools differently. So, first, we are trying to bring out versions of tools that everyone uses, then we can customize those for everyone,” she says.

Indeed, once the initial workspaces are up and running, the firm expects to introduce more new workspaces by February or March to serve all levels of the firm, which will address any common areas and functions needed by people in different areas. “Each person will have a workspace serving all the functions they do every day,” Gourragne says.