Symphony Innovate rolled into town again with a focus on compliant communications, voice integrations and the ubiquitous advent of AI. In this blog, I reflect on the event and some of the pertinent highlights.
Perhaps more so than any other Innovate event, it was pleasing to see demonstrations of solutions spanning financial and non-financial market institutions, front, middle and back office, asset classes and more. One of the benefits of ipushpull to our clients is that we are data agnostic – the platform adapts easily across asset classes as shown by the likes of Trayport in Commodities, Natwest in FI, and TPICAP in Equities alongside our exciting upcoming projects in the crypto space, exchanges, asset management and venues.
We showcased TaDa at Innovate, New York last year so it was of particular interest to see the FIA Tech demo - showing how chat can be used to access large data sets in a user-friendly format, rather than legacy overnight SFTP file delivery. Through our work in this sector, we’ve seen that adding new channels of delivery can not only be valuable with existing clients, strengthening relationships and increasing stickiness but also as a valuable source of new data as you now get to see how clients are using your data. Our chatbots record every aspect of usage; what queries are run, on what products, what time of day, everything is stored and made available for analysis to create a better service.
We have also seen that a move away from bulk delivery creates an opportunity to serve new clients, for example, you can provide a “pay-per-view” model of data usage. This is made possible by having the ability through ipushpull to control and monitor access. Reducing the economic barrier to entry for your products or data can create significant new markets to sell into, especially when you combine this with reducing the technological barriers by providing access to desktop applications.
TaDa represents a core use case of ipushpull – data sharing to where your clients want to see your data. One thrilling aspect of AI is the way it can provide new avenues of questioning and sharing your data – move away from syntax to natural language and, in doing so, allow your users to fully realise the potential of your data. With a data infrastructure ideal for integrating via AI ipushpull remains the go-to for your data sharing needs.
Continuing the AI theme, the Amenity Analytics demo was interesting in a number of ways, essentially a research tool it highlighted the benefit of AI in making sense of thousands of documents and providing an easy way to question that data. What stood out for me was that it provided the context and quotes from the original material that it used to come up with its answers. To my mind, it was a useful tool to help get away from the black box model and be unable to explain why AI has answered as it has. It may also be a valuable step in building more confidence in the models as it looks and acts like essays with references that we have written over the years.
In an example of the broadening use of Symphony, IG Markets presented how they use Symphony for compliant messaging as well as taking control of their relationship management processes - using automation to keep high-touch clients up to date, no matter which platform they are on. ipushpull can use Symphony federated chat to connect to multiple other data sources and integrations – alongside having our own native chatbot frameworks in Teams, Slack, WhatsApp and more. Several clients use our platform to provide a more personalised service through automation, leaving employees to focus on higher-value tasks and less standard queries. Pre and post-trade workflows involving bots can be accessed via WhatsApp to ensure your reach your client where they want you to. This tailored omnichannel and bot workflow can lead to huge efficiency gains - learn how one client took STP from zero to hero using chat automation.
Automating and using technology to streamline processes only works if you can adhere to the ipushpull mantra of “Right data. Right time. Right place”. We are confident in our ability to deliver the first two but the destination needs to be correct and relevant. Using group email addresses and distribution lists to address the right people is a clear mistake. The idea that cc’ing as many people as possible increases the chance of a successful response seemingly dominates the thoughts of many the world over. In answer to this and the 40% of emails that go to the wrong place the Symphony Operations Directory that is now available looks like a brilliant tool. Each firm maintains its own contact lists and tags users appropriately so that external users can find the right people easily for their chosen asset class, type of query etc. It's also accessible via API to build into other desktop tools for even easier access and less context switching between applications. We are building this into our platform as I type and look forward to seeing the huge impact it will have on our clients.
On a final note and something I’ve come to label a “chartbot”, there was a great demonstration by HSBC and Insight of the HSBC FX bot which provides valuable market colour, indicative levels and charting. If the first stage of chatbot was to query data and respond in text or a table, then the next stage is charting or presenting user-friendly forms. Deliver a better UI experience and drive the workflow with clearly defined messaging (in the form) rather than as a free-flowing process.
Are you interested to know more? Why not head to our omnichannel data delivery page to learn about how ipushpull is leveraging AI and other exciting technologies.