Ahead of each Symphony Innovate, Symphony celebrates with a series of Hackathons where teams can connect to our community, accelerate creative development, and encourage collaboration in-person as well as online. This year, over 140 developers‚ our biggest turnout yet! – joined us at our Innovate Asia Hackathons in Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo. Here, teams ranging from global banks to software startups to universities gathered to build innovations on and for Symphony, leveraging our open APIs, unique chat interface and unique security model.

It is always thrilling to watch our Hackathon participants come together to build innovative, unique solutions for real‚ and sometimes urgent‚ use cases, and of course to compete for the title of either Most Cutting-Edge Technical Development or Most Impactful Business Automation Development. HKEX and Deutsche Bank also sponsored host prizes for Best Collaboration Workflow Between Two or More Companies and Highest Impact on End-to-end Coordination Across Banks & Clients, respectively.

This years’ Hackathon contestants did not disappoint! Among innovations presented include use cases for trading, sales, research, compliance, technology and operations functions. Read on to hear about the winners in each region, and what they were able to achieve on Symphony in just 24 hours:

Hong Kong

Most Cutting-Edge Technical Development Award: Diamond from JP Morgan

Team Diamond from J.P. Morgan developed the Question/Answer Broker bot to automatically track and identify users’ support questions within chatrooms. The bot enables quicker response times for users by both redirecting the question to the correct chat room, or by pulling from its FAQ list to quickly answer common questions.

Most Impactful Business Automation Development: Consent Bot by Synergy from Goldman Sachs

Regulations on seeking client consent before filling client orders can be complicated, time consuming, and prone to human error. To address this problem, Team Synergy from Goldman Sachs created the Consent Bot which automates this process by automatically dispatching consent requests directly to customers. It then collates their responses and shares them with traders over Symphony, saving valuable time and minimizing the risk for human error.

Exclusive Host Award‚ Best Collaboration Workflow Between Two or More Companies: H2O from HKEX and HSBC

Our Hong Kong Hackathon hosts, HKEX, sponsored an additional category for the firms who created the best cross-company workflow. Team H2O from HKEX and HSBC worked together to create a bot-to-bot workflow that streamlines manual processes involved in margin calls. In this workflow, the HKEX bot calculates collateral and positions, watches for event triggers, and communicates margin call alerts to the HSBC bot, which then identifies teams or customers who own the respective positions and request funding. The responses are consolidated and sent back to the HKEX bot to resolve in their upstream system.

Singapore

Most Cutting-Edge Technical Development Award: SS Hackers from Standard Chartered Bank

Team SS Hackers from Standard Chartered created the SWIFT bot. This External-facing bot understands natural language to process instructions that initiate payment transactions and answers trade status enquiries. Bot also displays aggregate status of all transactions via an interactive chart embedded in a message.

Most Impactful Business Automation Development: DEEP WATeRS from Deutsche Bank

Processes around price discovery, KYC checks and trading and/ or settlement of OTC swaps are currently unstructured and manual. Team DEEP WATeRS created a bot that can monitor chat rooms to track and distribute RFQs, collate responses, and obtain price information to help automate these tedious processes. It also supports post-trade dispute resolution through dynamic room creation and adding of relevant ops teams.

Exclusive Host Award‚ Highest Impact on End-to-End Coordination Across Banks & Clients Using Symphony: Bitter Sweet Symphony from Deutsche Bank

Singapore Hackathon host, Deutsche Bank, sponsored an additional category for the development with the highest impact for banks & their clients. Team Bitter Sweet Symphony won this award for their bot which helps users in three different ways: 1) handling KYC onboarding with document checking and re-routing 2) using NLP to respond to trade status inquiries in real time and 3) dynamically linking chat rooms to help with knowledge collation. These three capabilities help traders complete work faster and more accurately, allowing them to focus on the more strategic aspects of their job.

Tokyo

Most Cutting-Edge Technical Development Award: Tendon from Goldman Sachs

Institutional knowledge can be difficult to collate and distribute, and community or support chat rooms are often flooded with the same questions. Goldman Sachs’ Team Tendon set out to solve this problem. Their Q&A Bot uses machine learning, ElasticSearch, and TFIDF to maintain a searchable index of past conversations that allows users to query it to answer questions, and @mention recommended experts to answer advanced questions.

Most Impactful Business Automation Development Award: RegBot by NKM^2 from Nomura

The Symphony community is made up of professionals in highly-regulated industries. It can be difficult to keep track of new regulations & updates, so team NKM^2 developed the RegBot to scrape websites or RSS feeds to consolidate regulation updates in a single place. Users who deal with these regulations, such as compliance teams, legal, market planning, and others, can subscribe to the RegBot to receive updates, including the ability to subscribe to updates for specific regulations. The bot also keeps track of conversations, allowing future users to get in touch with experts for certain regulations.

Thanks to all who participated in our Innovate Asia Hackathons, and congratulations to the winners! See you next year!