In the calendar year, June marks a period of change. As spring stretches into summer, the days become shorter, the nights longer. This same time period also ushered in major changes at financial messaging and collaboration platform Symphony Communications, with its acquisition of voice communications platform Cloud9 Technologies, and a changing of the guard, with Brad Levy taking the reins from founder David Gurlé.

Levy joined Symphony in July last year, but it wasn’t a surprise when the company announced earlier this year that he would be taking over as CEO. Over the past 30 years, having started his career as an analyst at Lehman Brothers, Levy has held senior positions at Goldman Sachs and Markit—which initially developed much of the directory components that became part of Symphony’s core offering, and transferred its work to the startup—and as a board member, then chairman, of the Symphony Software Foundation, now known as Finos.

Gurlé, who Levy replaces, came from a telecoms background, starting as an engineer, then moving into business and alliance-building roles, holding real-time collaboration services positions at Microsoft and Thomson Reuters before “collaboration” was a thing. After short stints in strategic management roles at Skype (prior to its sale to Microsoft) and telecom provider Avaya, Gurlé co-founded a startup called Perzo, a platform that united different communications standards, from email to instant messaging, to audio and video communications.

Gurlé’s co-founders were treasurer and board member Steve King, who shared Gurlé’s love of all things aviation—the two both being qualified pilots—and who left the company in 2013 to focus on aviation and venture capital businesses, and Michael Harmon, who served as CTO of Perzo and subsequently of Symphony, leaving the company last December. Symphony does not appear to have a replacement CTO.

They didn’t know it, but the trio was in the right place at the right time. Out of the blue, in April 2013, a scandal blew up at Bloomberg, where journalists used login records to the Bloomberg terminal to determine that a Goldman Sachs employee had probably left the bank after not logging into their terminal for an extended period.

Though the Bloomberg journalists could only see login records and not details of what clients were using the terminal for, financial firms became paranoid that others could read their chat messages or see what specific instruments they were thinking about trading. Goldman Sachs, in particular, seemed to take the breach personally, and led the formation of a consortium of banks determined to reduce their reliance on Bloomberg in these potentially compromised areas, hatching a plan to build an industry-led communications platform independent of the vendor. Perzo and its technology was the keystone of this effort.

The consortium started raising shocking amounts of money: In October 2014, it raised $66 million from 16 bank and buy-side investors. A year later, it raised another $100 million, and added participants—notably tech giant Google. In 2017 and 2018, it raised a total of $130 million, bringing the four-year-old company’s valuation to almost $1 billion. In 2019, it raised a further $165 million, and $50 million more in 2020, for a total of $511 million in funding from 32 investors.

So, Symphony was good at raising money. But was it good at anything else? The company progressed well at integrating data sources and third-party services, with Symphony as the consolidation point for them all, signing up sell-side users, and providing a platform for developing new bots and services. But it struggled with buy-side take-up early on, and also with an identity crisis that saw the company’s messaging go from being initially touted as a Bloomberg-killer—a claim that company officials distanced themselves from, despite some using it in their email signatures—to being compared to developer collaboration tool Slack.

Then came what should have been Symphony’s shining hour: the Covid-19 pandemic that forced financial markets participants to work remotely and rely on hitherto unnecessary technology to perform basic tasks, including the simple act of merely talking to colleagues. But while Zoom went from a virtually unknown app to becoming its own verb, where was Symphony? The timing of Levy’s appointment seems intended to set Symphony squarely on track to deliver more results—fast. The Cloud9 acquisition—and an accompanying statement that this deal will be “the first of several acquisitions for Symphony—suggest that the company is looking to fill gaps in its offering, or perhaps expand that offering to new areas.

And despite some setbacks—such as shelving its Sparc RFQ tool for interest-rate and cross-currency swaps while the Commodity Futures Trading Commission investigates whether it needs to register as a swap execution facility (Sef)—Levy seems well placed to deliver. And the banks have definitely seen small wins, such as developing bots on the platform. But with more than half a billion dollars invested and no sign of a “Bloomberg-killer” after seven years, Symphony’s backers may be growing impatient for elusive bigger wins. And perhaps the way to achieve those is to cash out and propose that Google—the only major backer that doesn’t have skin in the game as a market participant—run the show. Symphony is, after all, an integration play, and who better to perform large-scale integrations than one of the largest tech giants, which is already a major provider of cloud infrastructure to these firms and their suppliers?

This is pure speculation on my part, though Google has begun working to provide exchange data feeds in the cloud, in addition to its cloud hosting services. And “Google Symphony” has a nice ring to it. But with Amazon Web Services upping its game in terms of the data hosting and analytics tools it offers to financial services firms, as well as launching its own online marketplace for market data, Google may also be thinking about how it can strengthen its proposition in the capital markets. And, like Gurlé with Perzo in 2013, Google may be in the right place at the right time.

But Google isn’t the only game in town. Perhaps by coincidence, former Symphony vice president of engineering Rob Wisniewski, and John Stecher—who, as managing director of client platforms technology at Goldman Sachs, created the Live Current communications platform that became part of Symphony’s communications platform—both now work at Blackstone Group. Wisniewski is managing director of the Blackstone Technology and Innovations division and chief software architect, while Stecher is CTO. Blackstone, which notably recently bought and flipped the Refinitiv business out of Thomson Reuters to the London Stock Exchange Group, has $112 billion of private equity money invested across 95 portfolio companies—some of which could be suitable add-ons to Symphony—and $39 billion in available capital to spend on new investments.

Another option is an IPO, which has been mooted in the past, though Gurlé has previously said this would not happen until the company is profitable. It’s expected to break even this year, so that—or a private equity-backed period followed by an IPO—could be a profitable exit for investors. But would that achieve its aims of taking on Bloomberg, or at least parts of Bloomberg’s workflows? That might be better achieved independently under the stewardship of an experienced former Goldman Sachs and Markit executive, or as part of a Big Tech company with virtually unlimited resources and an appetite to push more into financial markets.