Symphony wraps up 2021 with two acquisitions, new partnerships and an expanded global leadership team
New York and London, December 14, 2021 – Symphony, the leading markets’ infrastructure and technology platform, is now serving over 1000 financial institutions, capping off a year that was marked by significant growth for the company. Symphony spent 2021 executing on partnerships, acquisitions, and continuing to build its global leadership team. Continual technological advancements throughout the year have proved Symphony’s commitment to solving markets challenges, providing secure communications and networked infrastructure while consolidating itself as the largest secure community of financial firms and professionals in the world.
On June 24, Symphony announced it had acquired Cloud9 Technologies, an innovative trader voice and electronic communication business, and on August 2, the company announced the acquisition of StreetLinx, the counterparty mapping platform, to offer the most complete and secure verified identity directory in financial services.
In the last year, Symphony also chose Google Cloud as its primary cloud provider as part of a strategic multi-year deal, while also establishing partnerships with AccessFintech, Saphyre, Unqork and Quant Insight. Symphony had previously announced a partnership with low-code, no-code Genesis to provide the financial markets community with interoperable technology and applications, built and deployed both securely and at speed.
The company has successfully proceeded with the rollout of Symphony 2.0, the second generation of its core collaboration platform, built in close partnership with financial firms to address their workflow needs, from front to middle, to back office and from the buy-side to the sell-side. Additionally, HSBC Global Private Banking engaged Symphony to develop and deploy HSBC GPB Chat, a client engagement platform that enables the private bank’s clients to interact with their relationship management team via one-to-one chat, group chat, document sharing and video/audio conferencing on WhatsApp or WeChat, in a secure and compliant way.
Global leadership team
2021 also saw the appointment of Brad Levy as CEO. “We continue to be committed to delivering networked market infrastructure,” Levy said. “We are thrilled to enter 2022 with an expanded team and are energized by the momentum from this year’s new partnerships and acquisitions.” Levy had joined Symphony in July 2020 as president and chief commercial officer.
In addition to Levy, Corinna Mitchell was named general counsel, Benjamin Chrnelich, the company’s chief financial officer, assumed the additional role of president, while Dietmar Fauser became chief information officer. Also, Michael Lynch joined as Symphony’s new chief product officer, Gary Godshaw – former CEO of Streetlinx – was named the company’s chief revenue officer, and Jim Miller – Cloud9’s former COO – was named chief customer experience officer. Additionally, industry veteran Marie Patton joined Symphony as managing director for APAC.
The team actively engaged with employees, customers and industry partners in London, Paris, Sophia Antipolis, New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Miami and Sunnyvale when travel resumed post COVID-19 restrictions.
Innovate conference
On November 2, the firm hosted its flagship conference Innovate, where it showcased a live demonstration of how it is integrating the technology of Symphony, Cloud9 and StreetLinx into one powerful inter-firm workflow, and introduced new features such as the Secure Event Service and Groups. The audience heard from senior leaders from BlackRock, BNY Mellon, Citi, JP Morgan Asset Management, Zoom and Google Cloud on lively and relevant discussion panels.
About Symphony
Symphony is the most secure and compliant markets’ infrastructure and technology platform, where solutions are built or integrated to standardize, automate and innovate financial services workflows. It is a vibrant community of over half a million financial professionals with a trusted directory and serves over 1000 institutions. Symphony is powering over 2,000 community-built applications and bots. For more information, visit www.symphony.com.
