Symphony Hires Brad Levy as Chief Revenue Officer, Plans Second Meetings Launch

WatersTechnology has learned from multiple sources that Symphony Communication Services has hired Brad Levy as its new chief revenue officer (CRO), replacing Basil Moftah, who left the vendor earlier this year. Levy will officially start at the company in July. 

Levy was previously the global head of loans at IHS Markit, and the CEO of its post-trade processing business, MarkitSERV. In the latter role, he oversaw the launch of the new TradeServ cloud-based platform.

Symphony declined to comment on Levy’s hiring. IHS Markit confirms that John Stewart has been named managing director and head of MarkitSERV. Stewart will be based in London.

Increased Demand

Levy’s CRO appointment makes sense for Symphony, as he knows the company well. For five years, he has served on the board of directors of the Fintech Open Source Foundation (Finos), a nonprofit organization that aims to grow the adoption of open-source software, standards and best practices in the financial services industry. Finos was previously the Symphony Software Foundation, which was founded to foster innovation around Symphony’s platform.

Symphony has grown its headcount amid the coronavirus pandemic, adding 10 staff members to the company’s roster of 330 full-time employees in the first 17 days of April. A handful of client-facing positions remain open as well.

And the messaging and collaboration platform provider is looking to add additional staff and launch new products. This could put a dent in its profitability goals, but Symphony sees this as a unique opportunity as banks and asset managers are looking at these tools in earnest due to uncertainty around when employees and customers will return to pre-pandemic office hours.

David Gurle, Symphony CEO, told WatersTechnology in an interview last week that the company has onboarded 14 new customers during the first quarter of 2020, with “most” of the new users being buy-side firms—a demographic that the company has struggled to capture.

Last week, Symphony unveiled Meetings, a new videoconferencing service specific to financial services firms, but the vendor is working toward a second summer launch to bring the service to scale.

Capitalizing on the privacy and compliance concerns that have arisen around other videoconferencing services, Symphony released this initial offering, but has bigger plans to introduce an end-to-end encrypted, enterprise-grade videoconferencing-in-the-cloud service by June 30, though that date might change.

Symphony originally built Meetings using the WebRTC (Real-Time Communications) standard. However, it found that building a compliant, fully cloud-based version to scale would take more work, time and input from the open-source community, so the Meetings that was launched last week—a decision that was made and executed in about a week—is only the first draft. The next version slated for late June will offer the service at scale.

For the current version, the vendor adopted a hybrid model that combines cloud and on-premise routing. In the matter of a couple of days, Gurle says, the company made a critical decision.

“Are we going to be appropriators? Are we going to take these standards we have, fork it, and build our own? Or are we going to rely on the standards that are being drafted?” Gurle says. “They are not 100% ready yet, but we are going to put all our might and energy into making it ready as soon as possible.”

No IPO for Now

As Symphony has pressed hard to get these videoconferencing services out while the demand is there—and as the company has ramped up its hiring to help with this development and handle increased volumes on the platform (see below)—the young company may take longer to reach profitability.

Gurle has plans to take Symphony public, albeit with the caveat that it won’t be until it is profitable. As of February, the projected time horizon to reach both those goals was 18 to 24 months, reported first by Business Insider. That target may be pushed back as the company pumps more investment into staff and new products.

“We are accelerating our investments; in other words, we are in a fortunate position to have the resources to grow,” Gurle says. “And with that, we decided to inject more cash into our business to meet the long backlog of customer requests as early on as possible—meaning that we will push further down the road the date to profitability.”

The 18- to 24-month time horizon is still a possibility, though not necessarily a priority.

“We could technically turn the company profitable today. That’s not the challenge. But we will not grow as fast, or we will not grow, and that’s not actually what we are expected to do,” Gurle says.

Handle the Surge

As was first reported by Financial News, Symphony has been aggressively hiring software developers to help build off of recent traffic jumps.

Gurle tells WatersTechnology that the average daily volume of messages sent over the platform, from both bots and humans, rose 273% from January 5 to March 22, up from a 30% increase over the same period in 2019. Daily active users have grown by 42%, compared with 9% last year, while mobile adoption has more than doubled since the start of the crisis. At the moment, the hottest spot of traffic is London, followed in order by Paris, New York, Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore.

Information sharing has ticked up in the platform’s two types of chat rooms; one room can contain thousands of users with publishing privileges, while the other, called Auditorium Rooms, permits posts only by certain users. Those posts can, however, be viewed by all. There has also been increased usage in the Symphony Client Extension API, which lets developers build custom apps within the Symphony user interface to be distributed internally at their firms.

Gurle isn’t sure whether the second quarter of 2020 will see the same new customer uptake, as some firms are pulling back on tech investment. However, he still expects growth. Instead of new sales such as those that shaped the first quarter, Symphony may rely on upselling, or adding more users to existing accounts.

With additional reporting by Anthony Malakian