Enterprise messaging app Symphony adds voice, video and key app integrations
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Symphony, the enterprise messaging app that counts a number of major investment banks among its investors and customers, is today taking the wraps of a run of new features that catapults the app into the next level of productivity solutions.
The company is adding new voice, video and screen sharing features in the form of a new product called Symphony Meetings, and it is also launching the Symphony Webhooks API, giving companies the ability to create their own integrations with third-party apps alongside a list of apps that Symphony itself is integrating from Salesforce, Github, JIRA, Trello and Zapier.
The news comes as Symphony says that it now has over 100 companies using the app, covering 116,000 analysts (19,700 buy-side and 86,866 sell-side), and some 8,700 companies partnering with it.
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The startup appeared to come out of nowhere in October 2014, riding the wave of interest in enterprise collaboration apps that also includes the likes of Slack, Microsoft’s Yammer, Hipchat and many others stepping up their pace to court the enterprise market, like Facebook, which will be launching its own enterprise offering out of beta next week.
Symphony has directed its own product not so much as a general enterprise app, but it has taken some of the consumerization trend that helped form those other apps (‘why shouldn’t the working world have apps that work just as well as consumer apps, but with more security?’) and has applied it specifically to the finance vertical (so far).
Its investor-customers include Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BlackRock, BNY Mellon, Citadel, Citi, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Google Inc., Goldman Sachs, HSBC, J.P. Morgan, Jefferies, Lakestar, Maverick, Merus Capital, Morgan Stanley, Natixis, Nomura, Societe Generale, UBS and Wells Fargo.
That essentially puts it also into competition against the likes of Bloomberg’s terminals and other older solutions for receiving financial information and acting on it.
Symphony has since picked up an impressive $170 million in funding from a those investment banks plus large strategic tech investors like Google. The company is now valued at $650 million and is reportedly looking at more funding soon.
Symphony Meetings, as the voice and video collaboration product is called, lets users launch voice, video, and screen sharing inside chat rooms with a single click.
Meanwhile, the list of partners that can now be integrated into Symphony’s platform include the following:
- Avaya—Avaya team engagement capabilities on the Symphony platform enables end-users to seamlessly and securely escalate messaging interactions to voice calls with a powerful, easy-to-use, development platform.
- ChartIQ—Time series-based charting and data visualization solutions for capital market applications.
- Dow Jones—Dow Jones on Symphony combines premium content with actionable context, delivering global business news, rolling market commentary and expert analysis from the Dow Jones newsroom, including exclusive content from The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s.
- FactSet—FactSet leverages Symphony by integrating the message and collaboration platform with both its Workstation and other value-add installed applications. Symphony and FactSet will create a powerful communication utility for the investment community.
- FinTech Studios—FinTech apps, news, research, financial data, and analytics from apps, content partners, and websites in real-time, leveraging big-data, machine learning, AI, and natural language processing (NLP) technology.
- FISMarketMap—FIS provides workflow integration between Symphony and MarketMap Terminal. Users can look up colleagues on Symphony, see user presence information, initiate a chat session from MarketMap Terminal or share content (prices, charts, etc.)
- FlexTrade—Communicate and distribute content to both portfolio managers and brokers directly from your trading blotter. Communications can be initiated by the trader or automatically based on a specific market event or situation.
- Gemalto—Gemalto has integrated its industry-leading SafeNet HSMs with the Symphony platform, providing financial firms with the highest level of security to protect encrypted data and financial communications.
- IHS Markit—The Markit Trade Manager app enables counterparties to resolve OTC derivatives trade breaks from the Symphony environment. Once trade details are amended, app integration permits the trade to match and be affirmed in MarkitSERV.
- Money.Net—Real-time US equity prices, options, international equities, foreign exchange, bond, and commodity futures to empower investors and traders.
- NexJ Systems Inc.—Enable NexJ’s customer management solutions on Symphony’s secure communication platform to better collaborate on opportunities.
- S&P Global Market Intelligence—Gain more convenient access to a growing universe of public and private company data. Find fundamentals, ratios, earnings, estimates, ownership, and industry data at a glance by launching S&P Global Market Intelligence over Symphony.
- Selerity Context—A.I. powered contextual search and real-time recommendation on proprietary and public content, automatically surfacing important information tailored to a user’s workflow.
- Synchronoss—The future of our mobile lives relies on maintaining security and productivity in all contexts. Synchronoss has partnered with Symphony to optimize the mobile user’s experience by enabling highly secure collaboration for highly-regulated enterprises.
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