This year, we hosted 115 developers across three locations for the Symphony Innovate 2019 Hackathons. Talented teams from the Symphony community came together in London, Paris, and New York to develop scalable solutions that bring progress and efficiency to their firms.
Developers focused on connecting Symphony’s growing community by building cross-company workflows for a chance to win the title of either Most Cutting-Edge Technical Development or Most Progressive Business Workflow. Hackathon participants got an early look at Symphony Elements, a set of standard off-the-shelf components to build workflows with consistency and speed.
The innovations presented provided solutions for trading, sales, research, compliance, technology and operations functions. Read on to see the winners from each region and learn what they were able to develop on Symphony in just one day:
Between the Lines leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis to assist with team management and to track employee attitudes. This provides accurate feedback in real time and can help teams like Human Resources work more effectively. The development includes a chat bot, conversations, and surveys, and was built with Symphony Elements.
The KYCD Status Update Bot reduces the lead time and bottlenecks involved in retrieving the current status of client KYCD. A user can request client KYCD status from a chat bot, receive the status, open tasks, and view a list of owners. The bot then automatically launches a chat room with the task owners to improve transparency, alleviate manual processes, and reduce the risk of client suspension.
The Structured Product for Clients bot enables clients to price and communicate about Structured Products electronically while getting live support from the Sales and Service Group. The client sends a message to a Société Générale chat room, where a bot listens for their request. A summary of their request is sent back to the associated Société Générale Account Manager. This development leveraged Symphony Elements and Symphony.Net SDK.
Confirming trade status with clients is a manual, inefficient process and the lack of standard templates in email make automatic matching, dispute & auditing difficult.. Finastra’s Client Confirmation Process provides structured confirmation data for automation and removes the need for email. Trade data can be viewed and automatically acknowledged or disputed directly on Symphony.
The BNP Paribas team built Maestro, an integration that leverages public APIs to connect multiple platforms to Symphony, affecting every part of the workday. Teams can automate everything from scheduling meetings to checking their commute. The judges were impressed by the breadth of external technologies which were integrated and clever innovations like checking transit time before scheduling a meeting.
BNY Mellon and Blackrock’s solution is called the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) eXchange Protocol (LEIxP), a collaborative technology utility that looks to automate the digital identifier process. This solution creates an industry capability to communicate, validate, consume and renew digital client identifiers through a single, standardized communication method. The LEIxP conceptualized an industry utility which leveraged the capabilities of Symphony to produce a multi-lateral cross-company workflow. Leveraging Symphony to crowdsource and automate digital identity credentials, validation and change notifications, the solution could easily save thousands of hours across the industry and revolutionize the way in which this information is shared.
The Société Générale Bot reduces human intervention using an event based, multi-bot workflow that replaces human interaction with bot-to-bot interactions. The team built a workflow that replaced an eight-step, error-prone, manual process involving operations, middle, and front office teams with several bots interacting with each other in the same chat room. This solution could be easily extended to other workflows.
The Citi RFQ Bot automates and facilitates corporate bond Requests for Quotes (RFQs), streamlining manual order entry between clients, sales, and traders. The Citi team leveraged both Elements and an Extension application for different parts of their RFQ workflow to build an elegant solution.
The Outlook Integration Bot transfers email chains to Symphony chat rooms with the proper data and parties. By pulling everything into one persistent chat room, members can engage in collaborative discussion and decisions can be made in real time. This solution used NLP to dissect and summarize long email chains by pulling keywords from the email chain.
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.