Symphony, the markets’ infrastructure and technology platform, will use the natural language processing technology from its purchase of Amenity Analytics to help market participants find useful signals in their unstructured data.
Brad Levy, chief executive of Symphony, described Amenity Analytics as a data capability company. Amenity Analytics does not sell data but uses NLP-based technology that allows clients to sift and sort semi-structured data such as research, news commentary, earnings transcripts or qualitative environmental, social and governance content. This type of content is often pushed across Symphony in chats, messaging or voice.
Levy told Markets Media: “We are going to look to apply Amenity Analytics’ technology to that data so users can find more signals through the noise. They give you a dashboard of the intelligence in the data that you are sending and receiving.”
Nathaniel Storch, chief executive of Amenity Analytics said in a statement that the firm has developed impactful use cases that tackle real-time ESG insights, targeted content delivery and information overload, and their offering will now be available to more than 1,000 institutions who are Symphony clients.
Levy said: “We now have a native NLP capability that we can sell independently, or bundle with the platform.”
Amenity Analytics is Symphony’s third acquisition in the past 18 months. In June last year Symphony acquired Cloud9 Technologies, the trader voice and electronic communication company, and in August 2021 it purchased StreetLinx, the counterparty mapping platform.
As a result of the integration of both firms’ technology and talent, Symphony has introduced its Instant Voice proposition and enhanced its directory. Levy said Symphony will continue to focus on voice next year as the movement to the cloud allows voice to become more incorporated into workflows.
“We will continue to invest in compliance around leveraging channels such as WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram and incorporating appropriate data into workflows,” he added.
Levy predicted that a big trend in the next year will be the communication space and how to make sense of data for business intelligence. As the cloud takes hold over the next couple of years, data tools will become more available and open-sourced.
“With Amenity we have a lot of good tools,” he added. “We expect to deploy the technology deeper and wider in financial services as capabilities become more available and Amenity brings us into that conversation in a much more direct way.”
Growth strategy
In addition to Amenity Analytics, Symphony has other tools to analyse data on the platform. In July 2021 Symphony selected Google Cloud as its primary cloud provider and the partnership with Google also involves data analytics.
Levy said his biggest take away from 2022 is that technology firms need to solve real problems or have real solutions.
“There will be a lot of challenging valuation discussions and cash flows that are struggling, but there is a lot of good product out there and there are a lot of problems to solve,” he added.
For example, he expects blockchain to become a real utility in the next few years as a new way of monetizing and owning assets as they are tokenized.
In order to deliver networked market infrastructure and make workflows more efficient, Symphony also expects to go to market with embedded collaboration platforms. For example, Symphony could be deployed from a chat application, Zoom, Salesforce or a dealer portal.
“Getting more embedded in other applications is going to be a big push for us,” Levy said.
Symphony is working on use cases in front, middle and back office workflows with a number of partners ranging from banks and asset managers, market infrastructure providers and independent vendors.
“It’s a matter of picking a few dozen to go to market in 2023,” added Levy.
He also expects that Symphony will continue to grow through further acquisitions and expanding geographically in Canada, Asia, Australia and Latin America.
