GreenKey aims to productize new research chatbot after winning Symphony hackathon

GreenKey Technologies, a New York-based vendor of natural-language processing (NLP) services in finance and public safety, is planning to productize its recently developed GK Research Bot, built earlier this month while competing in a virtual hackathon in New York, hosted by financial chat and workflow platform provider Symphony Communication Services.

Built using GreenKey’s proprietary software development kit and the Symphony chat platform, the research bot allows users to drag and drop documents—an earnings call transcript, for example—into the Symphony chat window. The text gets processed by GreenKey’s NLP technology, picks out pre-set, user-defined terms and key performance indicators (KPIs), performs sentiment analysis to realize the speaker’s intent, and generates a structured, searchable summary for the researcher. The entry won the category of most cutting-edge technical development, one of three possible titles that also included most impactful business automation and best “work-from-home” workflow.

The common challenge facing clients that this bot aims to solve for, says GreenKey CTO Tom Schady, is that they are all bombarded with information, particularly of the unstructured kind. Sell-side teams don’t have the time to engage with every buy-side client, and buy-side teams could never digest all the research they want to.

“A user’s Symphony chat window is the perfect integration point—it gives them a powerful toolset. For instance, they can cut and paste a new earnings document into our engine and immediately understand its meaning, narrow down their focus: ‘I want to look at excerpts that have to do with revenue, so show me all the relevant passages from the CEO,’” Schady says.

The GK Research Bot is linked to the vendor’s NLP front-end, called Focus Studio, which allows users to build and edit NLP models in a no-code environment, requiring no formal engineering. As users refine their custom models via Focus Studio, that will help the bot better understand and identify important signals and content contained within the research documents it analyzes.

When asked if the company has plans to productize the bot, Schady says that is “absolutely” on the table, though some tweaks will likely be made before an official rollout.

“There’s a big difference between the quality that we would build in eight hours versus something we productize for a bank. And so hackathons are a great discovery tool,” Schady says. “Our core products are still sales and trading and police body camera analysis, but some minor experimentation is important. We’re talking to our customers now to validate this idea before spending any significant time building it.”

Though the Symphony platform, in part, underlies GreenKey’s bot, all hackathon contributions are property of their owners. Because Symphony does not require contestants to forfeit their IP, participants are free to commercialize their hackathon entries, says Olivier Poupeney, head of developer relations at Symphony. GreenKey is a Symphony partner, and as such, Symphony will promote its commercialized solution.

The hackathon judges—which included Symphony’s head of operations workflows, director of technical account management, and developer community specialist—were impressed by Team GreenKey’s presentation, but had trouble deciding which category it best fit into.

“The judges thought a strong case could be made for ‘Most Impactful Business Automation,’ but in the end they agreed that building a bot workflow that interacted with an on-premise NLP engine to power document analyses and research distribution represented the next stage in enterprise-ready workflows built on top of Symphony,” Poupeney says. “One of the criteria for ‘Most Cutting-Edge Technical Development’ is that it shows a never-before-seen approach—this was the first hackathon presentation that showed a workflow that utilized a production-ready NLP engine, which could be deployed on-premise to power a bot on Symphony.”

Team GreenKey will go on to compete in the Symphony Hackathon Olympics, which will be held later in 2021 on a date yet to be determined, as one of eight teams from three regions—the Americas, Asia-Pacific, and EMEA—that qualified to participate.