UPDATE: Symphony Unveils Content Partners, Icap Plans Rollout to "Thousands" of Brokers

Symphony chief executive David Gurle says the vendor has more than 100 other providers wanting to join its ecosystem, and has received interest from at least a dozen more since launching Tuesday, Sept. 15, which will ultimately lead to an app store-style portal dubbed Symphony Marketplace, which the vendor plans to roll out in the second quarter of next year.

In the meantime, one firm already testing the platform is interdealer broker Icap, which plans to roll it out "immediately" after beta testing to all sales and product staff in the broker's e-commerce business, and any other client-facing roles, says Dean Berry, chief executive of Icap's e-commerce division. In addition, "Icap has thousands of brokers, who will all eventually have access," he says.

To access pre-integrated data from its partners, users must first subscribe to the data sources─though S&P Capital IQ is making basic company data available for free to all Symphony users. Then, when they hover over a hashtagged stock symbol in a message, they are presented with a pop-up containing a series of options, where they can choose to set up an alert for that symbol, or to display a window of each vendor's data. For example, Dow Jones will provide access to premium news from Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, relevant to specific countries or topics; while Symphony users will be able to access S&P Capital IQ company financials, estimates, ratios and ownership data for free, and─for S&P Capital IQ subscribers─link to S&P Capital IQ's analytics platform; and Selerity will provide access to contextually relevant news from its new Selerity Context recommendation solution.

"We've received a significant amount of inbound interest from many different partners, so we expect to see this accelerate," Gurle says, describing Symphony as a "launchpad" that provides access to different forms of collaboration, which he believes will be more critical to information platforms of the future than content alone.

"What we see happening is that because messaging is so core and central, firms want to eliminate the distance between the content they use and share, and make it as close as possible to the communication platform they want to use─for example, they don't want to have to paste a URL into an email; they just want to drag and drop content," he says. "The focus of the partner ecosystem is to find a way to bring content and communications into one platform."

Indeed, Joanna Appleton, executive director and head of EMEA partnerships at Dow Jones, says the news provider integrated its content directly into Symphony's workflow so that users wouldn't need to leave the messaging interface to read news stories.

The first stage of creating that ecosystem is creating a sandbox where providers of third-party tools can make their offerings available to clients, which in the second quarter of next year will become an app store of third-party services. The second phase of the ecosystem will provide deeper collaboration tools, such as integration with audio and video sources, though this could also extend to group chat programs or even to a company's trading floor PBX system. In fact, the vendor has already integrated with Google Hangouts to allow users to invite colleagues to participate in live chats through the messaging interface.

In addition to integrating more content providers, Symphony will benefit from making more data available as existing content partners expand the data they make available via the platform. "We will bring more and more content [onto Symphony]─for example, Platts for energy and commodities data, and Standard & Poor's ratings─over time," says John Macdonald, general manager at S&P Capital IQ.

However, Gurle insists that Symphony doesn't want to be a data aggregator─and certainly isn't trying to be the Bloomberg-killer that the market is casting it as. "People are positioning us against an incumbent player, and we are really not after that market. We don't want to be an information terminal," he says. "Other vendors provide ‘information terminals,' not collaboration platforms, and we think that era is over where you use content to jump into interaction. There are different ways of operating a partner model─you could be an aggregator, but we decided against that. The universe is unbundling, and ... it's better to be a rendezvous facilitator between providers and customers."

Nevertheless, potential users are hoping to use Symphony to displace incumbent messaging solutions. "There's one big one out there, and it's a very good one, but if it is only used for messaging, then on a per-word basis, it's very expensive," says Icap's Berry.

Symphony's service will be available free of charge for individuals, while Symphony for businesses of more than 50 users costs $15, as does Symphony for enterprise.

The formal launch and partner announcement comes as the New York State Department of Financial Services announced it has reached agreements with Symphony and four of the vendor's bank backers─Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and Bank of New York Mellon─to retain storage of certain records and chat messages for seven years, and also have the participating firms store duplicate copies for their own. Officials said at the time that Symphony's claims of "Guaranteed Data Deletion" would make it harder for the firms to conduct market surveillance, and spot any anomalies that might signal market abuse.

"We agree with Wall Street: Cloud is not a secure infrastructure... and so we had to think hard. So before the word you are typing leaves your computer, we encrypt it with a secret key that is only known by the sender and recipient. So there are multiple layers of security that provide protection against cyber attacks," Gurle says, adding that the NYDFS ultimately gave Symphone a clean bill of health. "Regulators have a significant role to play in our economies, and everything depends on their success."