Symphony CEO Brad Levy described interoperability as the “holy grail” for financial markets, which can enable seamless workflows across platforms, asset classes, and geographies. Speaking to Trader TV, he emphasised that while progress has been made over the past decade, achieving full interoperability remains challenging without cloud migration and agentic AI.
Levy outlined Symphony’s “contain, converge, collaborate” approach to AI deployment, stressing operational risk management and scalable, secure design. He also noted the industry’s shift towards always-on, circular markets, driven by user expectations of real-time interactions and cloud-enabled innovation, while balancing human work cycles in an increasingly 24 /7 global market.
Transcript
Jo Gallagher Where is the industry at in being able to achieve interoperability across platforms and asset classes?
Brad Levy It’s a bit of a holy grail. Like you’re maybe never there because there’s so many new things that keep coming. But the reality is we need platforms that can drive more together. So we are seeing a lot of engagement on different market infrastructures, clearing, settlement, exchange, trading, data, analytics, all trying to work more together for the user. The last 10 or 15 years have seen a big jump up in interoperability, I would say, where you’re less pinned to an application, you can move around more seamlessly. But there’s still a lot of challenges to interoperability at a grander scale, which really starts to relieve you from your seat, a location, or being pinned to a particular application where maybe you need something else, but you don’t want to necessarily leave the place you are. And how do you really get that alert or that interaction going without leaving your core frame of risk or trading?
Jo Gallagher We also see like the development in agentic AI and cloud and how that’s accelerating innovation. How do firms need to prioritize their investment when it comes to, you know, being ahead of the curve, but also making sure that they’re ahead of operational risk?
Brad Levy Yeah, so the operational risk is paramount. We really can’t move on these agentic AI flows without understanding the risk. We have a way of saying contain, converge and collaborate. You have to contain first. I would argue until we’re really in the cloud in a much bigger way, true agentic flows are going to be challenging. That said, there’s a lot of AI-type flows in the market today. They tend to be maybe more limited to your firm, to you as an individual or maybe your desk. So how do you get agentic AI flows flowing, not just with you but others around you and people that you may not even know that would benefit from your interactions? That all has to be done with privacy, with scalability, solving a real problem or adding real value. So the movement is early. It’s been probably 20 years in on some forms of automation that alert you or bring you to somewhere. But the real agentic movement is much more autonomy, which only comes with trust iterations. And we have a long way to go for real agentics AI where you’re doing front, middle, and back office. Across multiple asset classes globally, which is the end state.
Jo Gallagher What role does interoperability play in being able to shape decision making, workflows and also the provision of liquidity?
Brad Levy So if you think you’re the smartest person in the room all the time, and you think that you’re at the front and everybody else is in the back, you never have a need for this stuff. But the reality is most people don’t get portfolios built that way. They don’t trade that way, it’s very rare that you are just a PM (portfolio manager) or a trader or anybody sitting in a vacuum. Everybody has to come together a bit more to really make this happen. People that transact, people that analyze, people that make sure that both actors are doing the right things from a compliance and surveillance perspective. There’s the regulators. So there’s a very big surface area to getting this done until we have the technologies, the problems, and the need to bring these together each market’s gonna go through its different journey. And I would argue the over-the-counter markets, the fixed income markets, the derivative markets have a ton of value to harvest from this. The real proof points are coming in the actual partnerships that we’re delivering now. Many in the middle and back office across DTC, Euroclear, Taskize, and Broadridge, and IFIX, where we’re dealing with settlement exception management, where you can get to your exception in a significantly compressed time, partially because you’re just getting out of email and moving to a real-time tool. That real- time tool will be based on our ability to get to cloud and do that securely. We’re launching our confidential cloud now, which will do key management up there, which secures messages even more. Coming through in the back half of this year, we’ll have CME, which is embedding us in their front office in the futures and derivatives space and beyond. So we have front office, middle office, and back office partnerships that are real with market infrastructures, driving a lot more interoperability in a secure way.
Jo Gallagher How does technology need to evolve in order to kind of shift towards this more circular, always on global markets?
Brad Levy So the reality is everything can’t be always on, but things are definitely going to be more on than not. Bitcoin as a concept is this 24-7 instrument that you can access any time and maybe settle at any time. The U.S. Securities markets have an on-time and after markets time, over-the-counter markets are a little different. So when you really think about how will this move forward, you know, quicker but securely, the cloud is a key enabler of this, and we just can’t minimize it. When the pandemic hit, we went to mobility. But the reality is we didn’t really go to cloud and we need to get there. We talk about things being very circular, but when you’re in the front office, you really still care about the trade and risk and maybe a little bit less about how that transaction’s processed so that it gets into your book. A lot more people now care about the operational flows. I would argue supply chain issues in the world have gotten people clued in to, if you don’t get it here, you’re not gonna get your end state. And if you have your end state but something changes in your material behind you, you’re actually not long the thing you thought you were long, ultimately. So email, T+2 settlements, all of that allow for a linear asynchronous process globally. Now that we’re moving more real-time in general as humans–order Amazon to your doorstep in hours. Now, how are we going to do drone deliveries in Amazon? How are we gonna make sure that portfolio trades can be done with less brute force for pure automation efficiency and more touch at a molecular level? So as a group, we’re going to build it. And the reality is, there’s no way to go back to asynchronous, five o’clock is the end of a day. We do have to figure out a way to allow things to turn off so that humans can deal. But that’s gonna be the ebb and flow and the push-pull as we go 24-7 in a world that’s pretty much set up for four and a half days a week.
Jo Gallagher I’d like to thank Brad for his insight, and of course, you for watching. To catch your other shows, including Trader TV This Week, every Monday at 6.45 am ET, go to Tradertv.net
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