Symphony taps Google for cloud, AI, data-sharing tools

Financial collaboration platform Symphony Communications Services is planning to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and data-sharing technology from Google, after confirming it will switch to the tech giant as its main cloud provider.

Symphony initially decided to switch cloud providers after assessing its existing deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to be too expensive, says Dietmar Fauser, chief information officer at Symphony. After holding discussions with both providers, he says Google was “more aggressive on cost, on storage, and on compute.”

Working with Google is also intuitive because the tech giant is an equity investor in Symphony, so it makes sense to draw on the massive technical resources of a partner with a vested interest in the Symphony business, he adds.

“As an organization dealing with regulated clients, the choice of cloud provider and where data will reside is significant, as these are all sensitive topics for banks and asset managers, so there’s no question that Symphony would have solicited lots of feedback from its clients,” says David Easthope, senior analyst at research firm Coalition Greenwich.

The deal will see Symphony begin migrating its platform to Google Cloud in the fourth quarter of this year. The process is expected to take about a year to complete, and will see Symphony’s core platform run in Google Cloud, with some associated services that may still need to run on AWS. Between now and Q4, Symphony will train its engineers on Google Cloud, and will plan and prioritize tasks, Fauser says.

However, a cheaper cloud environment isn’t the end game of the deal. “We see infrastructure as a commodity. So the focus of this is what will come from working with Google beyond infrastructure,” Fauser says. “What excites us is that in the discussions with Google, it became clear that there was the potential for more, beyond just classical cloud provision—for example, around data sharing, where Google is one of the historical leaders in the space.”

One potential area of tighter integration is around Google’s Workspace suite of professional applications, including Sheets, Docs, and Gmail, such as integrating Symphony chat into Workspace, which Symphony uses internally and which Fauser says is becoming more widely used among its financial clients as an alternative to over-dependence on Microsoft Office applications.

But more broadly, Symphony sees potential to create new workflows for sharing data and documentation, particularly in primary markets, where there is greater use of spreadsheets and emails, which could be replaced with more efficient means of communication.

“We’re focused on new issue markets because they are more of a ‘greenfield’ scenario—there’s a lot of room for digitization and because they involve a lot of confidential data,” says Symphony CEO Brad Levy. “Transactions data needs to be widely shared—with the parties involved in a deal, securities services providers, fund administrators, and custodians. Right now, a lot of that information is held in deal rooms and in emails. Our goal is to make sure that federated firm-to-firm transaction can happen.”

“In some opaque markets, there is less information, so it’s important to be able to share that information between participants. So, it makes sense to have an infrastructure where you can upload and share documents, or collaborate in real time on data, rather than sending information by just email or even fax,” Easthope says. “Symphony is building workflows that address friction in the trading and investment process. They want to not just automate processes but improve processes.”

Levy’s plan requires an identity management system in a distributed cloud environment, with Symphony’s end-to-end encryption to ensure data and documents remain secure and are only accessible by those authorized to view and make changes to them. But the potential gains boil down to simpler and more secure sharing of data.

“There’s a difference between sharing a document and working on a shared document,” Levy says. “There’s a lot of structured data sitting around in databases that needs to be accessed, such as reference data. And there’s a lot of unstructured data, such as documents and recordings of phone conversations,” that require additional steps to turn that information into shareable data and insights.

That’s where Google’s AI capabilities come in. “In AI, there’s a maturity curve—from, for example, natural-language processing to conversational AI,” Fauser says. So at one end of that curve is the low-hanging fruit of placing digital agents in Symphony’s chat rooms to monitor for keywords and extract critical information in real time.

Further along the curve, Fauser envisages being able to leverage Google’s conversational AI along with Symphony’s recent acquisition of trader voice communications platform Cloud9 Technologies to allow it to capture information from traders’ phone conversations and make it available to support trading decisions.

“Google Cloud is known in the industry for offering strong AI and machine learning tools that can be used by firms running various investment strategies, conducting research, and engaged in risk management,” Easthope says. “There are also potential efficiency gains to be achieved by applying AI and machine learning to communication of data within firms—it’s just a question of whether you target the front, middle, or back office.”