Symphony's Gurle: the best is yet to come

For Symphony, this year is all about asset managers. The financial communications tool, backed by a group of banks, has been pushing to expand its footprint on the buy side in a bid to encourage client-to-dealer communication.

The chat and collaboration tool, which in its earlier version was dubbed Perzo, before being acquired by a group of 14 banks and renamed Symphony, was created by David Gurle, the company’s founder and chief executive officer.

“In the last 12 months we have had two interesting milestones: we have reached an inflection point in terms of activity and in terms of the network effect kicking in during the last quarter of 2016; and we have also been enhancing the product,” Gurle tells FX Week.

Last year, Blackrock became the first large asset manager to sign up to use the tool, followed by others such as T. Rowe Price. While the chat tool has been in use at banks internally since late 2015, the external communications aspect did not go live until June 2016.

Within six months of the messaging and collaboration tool going live, it accumulated 75,000 users as internal rollouts at sell-side institutions progressed, with some 67 companies signing up. Today, the cloud-based platform, which allows users to implement bots and personalised functionalities on it, has more than 200,000 licensed users across some 180 companies.

On average, Symphony racks up more than 100,000 active users per month.

“The buy side continues to connect and we have seen an acceleration of interest in that space since the end of last year. We expect to have 300,000 users by the end of this year,” Gurle says.

“This year we have been adding large asset managers and a number of hedge funds, but we are still probably growing faster on the sell side than on the buy side. At the moment, the split between buy and sell side is around one-third buy side,” he adds.

Customise me

Aside from the low-cost proposition Symphony offers, the ability to tweak and add to the platform is proving a unique attraction for users. Gurle says clients are finding new use cases for Symphony across departments, from the front office and through operations and IT to the back office.

“The enrichments and customised features that clients add to the Symphony platform greatly enhance the product. Once people realise Symphony is a platform, rather than an application, the opportunities are vast,” he says.

Reporting for Mifid II is one such potential application, as clients don’t need to build out separate connections and pipes for reporting purposes – they can do it all through Symphony

David Gurle, Symphony

Gurle recounts his surprise at one of his clients calling him to say they will be using Symphony for compliance and reporting for the second Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid II). “Reporting for Mifid II is one such potential application, as clients don’t need to build out separate connections and pipes for reporting purposes – they can do it all through Symphony,” he says.

Once the platform switched on external users, clients started adding new capabilities and features on top of the messaging capacity. Gurle says some institutions have integrated Symphony into their workflow, while others have added price-discovery functions and indication-of-interest capabilities.

“The last six months has seen a big uptick in Symphony’s FX usage. I initially thought equities would lead the way in take-up, but actually, FX is growing at a faster rate,” Gurle says.

But while users can freely add functionalities, Symphony does not plan to become a transaction venue.

“We connect with trading applications, and users can do pre- and post-trade lifecycle events, but we refrain from being part of the transaction business. Users can show an indication of interest, we have customers who have built request-for-quote systems on top of Symphony, and it can also be used for trade negotiations, marketing and sales – but Symphony is not a trading platform,” Gurle says.

Be my partner

Since its launch, Symphony has entered into nearly 30 partnerships with other companies to expand its functionality. The company agreed a deal with Thomson Reuters in June, to make Symphony available for users of Thomson Reuters’ Eikon system, which provides news, real-time data, trading and its own messaging tool.

In May, BNP Paribas made a strategic investment in the company to the tune of $63 million in new capital, to accelerate the platform’s global adoption and support its expansion into new markets. The sum adds to the $170 million raised by Symphony previously.

Gurle has also relocated to Singapore to lead the push into Asian markets. “We are looking at different ways of expanding our product portfolio and the plan is to grow internationally, especially in Asia, Japan and Australia,” he says.

“The best is yet to come. It’s a really exciting and reassuring time for our investors,” Gurle promises.