Symphony Taps Google Cloud AI for Voice Analytics

Financial markets infrastructure provider Symphony says it will combine its AI and domain expertise with Google Cloud’s transcription and generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) capabilities to offer built-for-purpose financial markets voice analytics.

The firm says transcription of voice in the financial markets space is a complex endeavour given the highly specialised and fast-paced nature of the business, its jargon, and the security required to protect the confidentiality of business deals, strategy, and everyday conversations. “Off-the-shelf transcription services are not fit-for-purpose and do not provide the security required by financial services firms,” Symphony states.

To provide its customers with high-accuracy voice analytics, Symphony will use Google Cloud’s gen AI platform, Vertex AI, to enhance its Cloud9 voice product with speech-to-text fine-tuning and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. Cloud9 is a cloud-based voice solution that helps finance and trading teams collaborate across multiple asset classes.

With gen AI, Symphony says Cloud9 will provide financial institutions with enhanced real-time voice analytics capabilities that can be used to improve customer service, accelerate trade reconstruction, and minimise post-trade processing issues while maintaining compliance and security standards. The compliance-enabling functionality can also extend to active risk analysis and risk management by flagging calls for compliance review when suspicious discussions are detected, it adds.

Beyond transcribing and summarising conversations for compliance, the gen AI-powered capability will be able to extract product and other contextual insights from unstructured data to enrich the Cloud9 user experience for an enhanced understanding of the market, Symphony claims, adding customers will also be able to extract additional insights from this data such as tagging relevant entities, understanding customer sentiment, and identifying trending topics.

“We have been on a journey with Google Cloud for the past two years, one that has been a true partnership on many fronts,” says Symphony CEO Brad Levy. “We are confident that by tapping Google Cloud’s AI capabilities for voice analytics, Symphony will be able to offer the more than 1,000 institutions we serve with top notch service that will create further efficiency and innovation in financial markets.”

Zac Maufe, global head of regulated industries, Google Cloud, adds, “Generative AI has the potential to transform the trading landscape from automating routine tasks to identifying potential misconduct through anomalies in data. Our expanded partnership with Symphony builds on the success of our long-standing collaboration, and with the integration of speech-to-text gen AI, Symphony can provide financial institutions with high accuracy voice analytics that can help improve risk management and drive efficiencies across the trading floor.”