Symphony boosts Cloud9 voice offerings with AI

Financial messaging and collaboration platform Symphony unveiled new AI-powered tools in the Cloud9 Trader platform last week at its annual Innovate conference in New York, building on its suite of offerings in messaging, trader voice, directory, and identity solutions.

Symphony acquired Cloud9, a voice solutions and trading turrets provider, in 2021. Since then, the company has built out new capabilities on the Cloud9 platform centered around ease of access and consolidation. The new AI-powered tools include background noise suppression, transcription, and visual dashboards.

The background noise suppression feature enables users to set the level of noise suppression to low, medium, or high depending on their work environment. Alex Francisci, head of product for markets voice and video, noted during the demo that 15% of the firm’s user base is still regularly working from home. “We’re also seeing an increase in the use of virtual desktop interface solutions and hot-desking solutions at our customers’ sites,” he said. “I’m not anticipating these trends changing, so we continue to focus on delivering cloud-based solutions for our users no matter where they are located.”

With the transcription tools, users can extract relevant information from calls throughout the day. Using Google’s speech-to-text capabilities and AI models, users can choose to have calls transcribed, with options to have AI further process the transcriptions and add tags for important information discussed during the call. The model showcased during the demo was specifically trained to identify a trade being made during a voice conversation.

Using the C9 portal, desk heads and compliance officers can then search for key words and pick up where trades were made. New visual dashboards allow these users to access and view data from thousands of calls to pick up on information related to call duration and counterparties connected, and so on. Information can be viewed by group, user, or individual line and can be used for new business opportunities and compliance.

Compliance burdens among banks have become apparent in the past few years as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission have issued fines to a wide range of financial institutions. 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 must weigh how much they’re willing to pay for these services, which ones are necessary but not exactly revenue generating, and they have to decide how much risk they’re willing to take on under regulators’ eyes.

Last summer, Goldman Sachs was fined $5.5 million by the CFTC for vendor breakdowns during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and employees working from home. Since 2022, at least 16 firms have been fined by the SEC for “widespread record-keeping failures” in maintaining and preserving electronic communications.

Symphony chief product officer Michael Lynch told WatersTechnology in 2022 that traditionally the physical hardware of the legacy turret was separate from customers’ communication and decision-making flows. “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,” he said. Those new audiences include research, operations, and risk teams who sometimes also need connectivity to trading desks as markets move.

In the wake of the hype around ChatGPT last year, participants across capital markets have infused more AI-powered tools into workflows. Nice Actimize has rolled out generative AI-based solutions designed to significantly reduce the manual and labor-intensive tasks currently employed in financial crime investigations and reporting. BlackRock chief executive officer Larry Fink announced at the beginning of this year that the asset manager was building AI “copilots” for Aladdin, its flagship investment management platform.

Symphony CEO Brad Levy says that despite the hype around AI, it will be incremental steps with the technology that will be most fruitful for the industry. “It doesn’t have to do that much,” he tells WatersTechnology. “It just has to solve for incremental problems over time, which is finding things that are hard to find.” Such incremental and iterative innovations are the only way for the industry to work at its best, he argues.