Symphony Communications first gained attention for its potential to shake up the cost structure of front office messaging with its low, $15 per user price tag. But large buy side firms that have been early adopters of Symphony now say they see the platform having even greater potential to shake up trading communications in other areas of the firm, outside the front office.
I think we tend to immediately jump to the front office role, but the reality is, particularly from a buy side perspective, we interface with so many kinds of organizations, Joseph Kochansky, managing director and head of the Aladdin Product Group at BlackRock, said at Symphonys Innovate conference in New York on Thursday, October 6. BlackRock, which has rolled out the platform to its entire user base, is part of the original consortium of buy and sell side firm backers that helped launch Symphony back in 2014.
Having a full enterprise stack of your entire organization being able to use it, and being able to interface with your entire organization and all these [external] organizations is really very powerful and its where the growth of Symphony will come, Kochansky said.
AllianceBernstein first began exploring Symphony last year when traders in its sell side business requested it for connecting to their clients, according to Karl Sprules, chief technology officer. The firm is now in the process of rolling out the platform across the firm, including both the buy side and sell side businesses, with plans to go live by end of year. But Sprules says the firm is also is increasingly looking to the open source platform for its potential to streamline communications outside the front office.
In the front office there are pretty well-embedded communications methods right now and I think we tend to dwell on those, but there is so much fragmentation and there is so much opportunity outside those front office use cases, Sprules said, during a panel discussion at the conference on Thursday. The front-office use cases are expensive and get the headlines, but I think the opportunity is all across the other parts of our business that have workflow needs. If we can make workflows from transactions flow from counterparties into our internal processes, I think thats where I see a huge amount of benefit and a huge amount of use cases.
Symphony emphasizes the enterprise-wide application of its service for streamlining both internal and external communications. Still, Symphony founder and CEO David Gurle says most customers initially take up the platform for front-office communications, primarily because of the comparatively low per-user cost of the platform compared to other front office messaging services.
Frustration in the finance industry over the bundling of messaging services with expensive data and analytics packages has spawned several efforts over the years to build momentum around new messaging platforms. Kochansky said that BlackRock had independently been contemplating investing in a collaborative messaging solution for its clients back in 2014, when it first learned of Symphony. The difficultly new entrants have in challenging established messaging systems, like Bloombergs, is that for communications to be successful, there needs to be significant take up.
We recognized that you really do need a consortium, Kochansky said.
The importance of having a large community of users on a communications platform was highlighted at BlackRock by its experiences first rolling out Symphony. In the firms beta tests, the platform didnt attract heavy usage because there werent enough users on the platform. The number of messages sent per user shot up from 5 to 10 per user per day during the beta test, to 60 per user per day once the platform was live across the firm.
The value in the network is being able to connect with the people you need to connect with to get your business done, Kochansky said.
Separately on Thursday, Symphony also announced that it was adding a video, voice and screen-sharing tool called Symphony Meetings to its platform, as well as Symphony Webhooks API, which is a tool to allow firms to develop and contribute their own integrations to Symphony partner applications.
