Symphony Expands Front Office Footprint with Cloud9 Buy
Posted by Colin Lambert. Last updated: June 24, 2021
Financial markets infrastructure business Symphony, has built upon its electronic communications network with the acquisition of Cloud9 Technologies, a provider of voice communications solutions. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The firm says the deal will see it “take the lead in front office communications” with new services and solutions combining trader voice with natural language processing (NLP) and automation. It adds the combined offering will accelerate trade flows, improve transactional accuracy, and extend back office and remote worker use-cases.
Symphony was originally purposed as a competitor in the chat communications space in 2015 after banks sought more control of their communications channels in the wake of the chat room scandal that embroiled FX, precious metals and interest rate markets. It has since built out its offering to incorporate services covering more of the trade workflow – this represents its first foray into financial markets voice technology. It now claims over 500,000 users across more than 500 companies.
“Symphony is building on our solid technology foundation and global network as we seek to tackle true pain points in markets’ workflows,” says CEO Brad Levy. “With this acquisition, Symphony takes the lead in the nascent market communications space and brings mission-critical trader voice capabilities to the Symphony platform, by adding C9’s features to our secure and compliant communication stack, with chat, voice and video meetings, file and screen sharing. Our combined capabilities will allow for more integrated and immediate conversational workflows, and front office users will be better served.”
Gerald Starr, CEO of Cloud9, adds, “Six years ago, Cloud9 set out to change how trader voice services were delivered to the modern trading desk. As messaging had already impacted the trading communications workflow, we felt the value of voice communications in fast and complex trading scenarios would be renewed by leveraging cloud delivery to create a community of users and provide them with the tools to communicate verbally. It is clear to us that the collective capabilities of our organisations will further drive value to the financial services community, enhancing and accelerating the delivery of secure cloud-based multi-modal communications.”