Since Symphony’s inception, it has been the company’s mission to promote a strong ecosystem of innovation by our customers and partners on the platform. As a result, we have taken an open API approach which benefits our end users as it fosters deep integrations and novel workflows. In the spirit of fostering open standards and interoperability to empower our community, I am pleased to share that we will support the FDC3 standard, and plan to extend its open source interface in order to offer more versatile integrations between desktop applications and Symphony. The richer FDC3 API will offer an array of options for streamlining and enhancing new and existing collaboration workflows for professionals in the financial industry.
This announcement coincides with a reiteration of our support of open source, FINOS and its mission, the organization committed to defining and developing open source standards for the financial services industry. I am honored to have been named to its board and we look forward to participating in more open source projects in the coming years.
A bit of background: FDC3 (which stands for Financial Desktop Connectivity and Collaboration Consortium) is an open standard for desktop integration in the financial industry. FDC3 implementations offer a relatively easy way for financial companies, where desktop real estate is a challenge, to achieve a much more integrated workflow on the desktop across new and legacy applications. FDC3 implementations can lower development costs for certain types of integrations and reduce time to market. Currently the FDC3 standard offers a somewhat limited interface or definitions of intents and contexts for integrating applications with chat and collaboration platforms. We have engaged with the FDC3 community and FINOS to define a richer interface based on real use cases and customer requirements, and we intend to expand the standard to a broader usage beyond the desktop applications.
Security and compliance have been at the core of the Symphony platform since its inception, setting the highest security standards for the financial industry. Symphony’s end-to-end encryption model has been the driving force behind the company’s extensibility and integration strategy with customers having full control over when and how their data flows in and out of Symphony.
In line with our existing extensibility and integration strategy, Symphony will continue to uphold our principles for security and compliance as we work to support an extended and improved FDC3 compliant interface for desktop integrations. We will work with FDC3 providers to offer additional controls to our customers to configure and fine tune the level of integration and context sharing between applications in accordance with security and compliance requirements.
We envision Symphony as the connective tissue between systems and desktop applications for data driven collaboration between internal and external parties. To achieve our vision Symphony will continue to offer different integration and platform extensibility options to make delivery of new and innovative solutions easier and faster. Specifically we will:
With heavy contribution from our clients and partners, we are in the process of finalizing a list of most impactful desktop integration use cases. The use cases range from being able to create a room, stage or send a message in Symphony from a trusted application to more complex scenarios where a user might be able to extract a context (i.e. post trade details ) in a structured format from a Symphony chat message with a single click and send it to another application for further processing. Also as we work to integrate Cloud9 and StreetLinx with the Symphony platform, we will identify features offered by these products that we can potentially expose via an FDC3 interface.
We continue to improve and expand the way our customers and partners can build and deploy platform extensions and integrations. By offering both server side and desktop APIs, we look to empower our clients and partners with the right set of tools to continue adding value and optimizations to the collaboration process. In the future, we will provide more specific details about our plan to enable the Symphony desktop client for desktop interoperability with FDC3. If you would like to discuss extensibility and/or integration strategy, I’d welcome the discussion.
Symphony is now in its tenth year of developing secure and compliant communications technology for global financial market participants. With over 500,000 users and more than 1300 firms using Symphony solutions, our industry relevance [and reliance] is widely recognized by clients, partners, regulators and journalists.
Our latest demo prepares Operations teams for the shortened T+1 settlement cycle. Watch this Q&A with UBS, Citi, JP Morgan, and Wells Fargo as they discuss how Symphony’s Operations Directory streamlines post-trade issue resolution with use cases including escalations, trade exceptions and settlement issues.
Trading during volatile times is tough. In today’s market, commodity traders may have it the toughest. However, with great challenge comes great opportunity.