Symphony blog

In the spirit of fostering open standards and interoperability to empower our community, I am pleased to share that we now 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.

As the vast selection of collaboration tools available to institutional traders continues to grow, coupled with the accelerated adoption of emerging technologies, many firms are struggling to address the knock-on effect this is having on trader workflows. In the seventh episode of Cloud9’s podcast series examining developments in the voice trading landscape, Cloud9’s Chief Operating Officer Jim Miller and Symphony’s Chief Product Officer Michael Lynch examine how fragmented workflows can be solved by consolidating trading tools with voice capabilities and how Symphony’s recent acquisition of Cloud9 is playing a key part in alleviating challenges.

The apparel industry has long been known for its resource and labor intensity. Some companies, like Nike and Hanes, have sought to improve the narrative for themselves. This week Lululemon’s sustainability efforts grabbed the headlines and attention of our ESG platform along with Samsonite and Puma. We also flagged the supply chain disruption in the industry due to the COVID outbreak in Vietnam.

In years past, the operations function at financial institutions was often regarded as background infrastructure (and also at times, overlooked by colleagues in other departments). But now, we’ve seen a shift – as the industry undergoes a massive digital transformation amidst a complex and evolving regulatory environment, operations has become a critical area of focus at the highest levels of the organization. In other words, operations professionals are finally getting the recognition they deserve.