At Symphony Innovate 2022, held last week in Manhattan, the annual event highlighted a further removal from the firm’s past lofty intentions, ideated by former CEO and founder David Gurle, to serve as the industry’s messaging platform of choice.

Now little more than a year after Brad Levy took the helm, the former IHS Markit exec says messaging is only a small piece of the puzzle Symphony wants to solve.

“Ultimately, the whole story for us is about data. The thing we’re most unique at is people data. That’s where we start,” Levy tells WatersTechnology. More specifically, that starting point is the directory of market participants’ names and phone numbers that Symphony has been curating by drawing on its own messaging platform and the platforms of its two recent acquisitions, Cloud9 and StreetLinx.

If that seems basic, that’s because it is. But, Levy contends, there is no similar directory for the thousands of people working in front-, middle-, and back-offices roles across Wall Street and other financial hubs. The closest is LinkedIn, but it’s not nearly an exhaustive, or always reliable, compilation. “It’s very tough to figure out who’s who,” he says.

Part of Symphony’s directory project includes the company’s decision to expand into know-your-customer (KYC) solutions, starting with a pilot ID service that will create personal digital identities, to be owned and controlled by their makers, and that would be able to be transported between entities, such as from one bank to another.

With the StreetLinx buy, the tech is allowing Symphony to take a typical directory model and build out personal fields so users can tailor their profiles to their interests, such as receiving news from the CNN app because a user chose that specific content source. The approach is meant to contrast the consumer experience, where, for example, someone receives an Instagram ad for an item they just bought in-store—a practice that just doesn’t fly in the heavily regulated financial markets.

Levy laid out this three-prong strategy that illustrates the way in which Symphony is developing solutions for the capital markets. He calls it “Blaze, Bedrock, and Fuel.”

“Blaze is the front office—hot, liquidity, friction. Bedrock is the foundation for operations people. And fuel is the data and insights you need to do your job in the front, middle, and back offices,” Levy says. “The first year or two we were very focused on establishing applications and workflows in the front and back office. The last six months we started to move back to fuel and thinking about the highly unstructured world of data.”

Reinventing… the telephone?

In his keynote speech, Levy identified exciting potential in some spaces that, to most minds, may seem fairly done with innovation: the telephone. And second to that, human voice.

“We’re reimagining telephony as a workflow. We’re diving into voice as a new energy source that can be refined,” he said.

The event featured a range of demos, showcasing Symphony’s new and improved voice capabilities for the middle and back offices, which include Instant Voice, a solution built for transitioning from chat to voice, sans dialing or ringing, by connecting to the internal Cloud9 network; Cloud9 Desk, an intercom solution across internal teams for trader-adjacent connectivity; Cloud9 Desk+, similar to Cloud9 but which adds up to six external connections; and for the front office, Cloud9 Trader; a complete voice engine for full-featured turret replacement with maximum connectivity to external counterparties.

Symphony is promising to prove to users that voice and the telephone should be brought back into workflows, and that voice, chat, and text can all work together.

In his follow-up keynote, chief product officer Michael Lynch laid out what he sees as the industry’s core problem when it comes to communications: there are too many tools available for use, and none of them serve enough purposes—not unlike a standard telephone that no one really likes to use.

“How many of you today have in your pocket a phone, and a calculator, and a camera? Nobody.” Lynch said. “The expectations for markets are far beyond what our technology provides today. And one of the core sources of that is that rigid, single-purpose systems break under stress. Bespoke hardware doesn’t have a place in our world today.”

(Probably) not a data company

If dethroning Bloomberg proved impossible, then perhaps re-engineering the phone—and the way it’s used—may be easier. But if Symphony wants to, and can, capture this world of unstructured voice data, it begs the question of whether it might one day look to add “data provider” to its list of descriptors.

For now, though, Levy says he’s not interested in such a title, nor in making money by selling content. However, he reserves the right to change his mind—if the business model changes.

“Historically, the trading platforms have said ‘This data is mine’ and sold it,” Levy tells WatersTechnology.

“My view is maybe there’s a different model. And as that happens, if I can add value to somebody like JP Morgan or BlackRock by leveraging their data, or even commercializing it or monetizing it, I might be [open to] that,” he says, comparing a potential role for Symphony to that of Spotify, which doesn’t create its own content but does distribute artists’ music.

Again, though, that is not in the company’s plans currently.

“We know our business. And we know what’s interesting in any moment in time, so we should be able to find the nuggets that are relevant every six, 12, or 18 months,” Levy says. “The challenge is, it’s changing every six, 12, or 18 minutes.”