Bots to dominate financial sector communications within two years in automation wave, messaging firm Symphony says
- HSBC, Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing have jointly launched two pilot bots on Symphony’s platform
- Asia-Pacific accounts for a third of Symphony’s about 430,000 users
Symphony Communications Services, a Silicon Valley messaging start-up used by some of the world’s biggest financial-services companies, expects robot-driven traffic on its platform to surpass human-initiated use within two years.
A wave of workflow automation is expected to speed up transaction and regulatory compliance procedures, and reduce human errors and costs.
“With stronger regulatory compliance requirements everywhere … the typical response is, let’s have more people give approval before something goes out,” Queenie Chan, Symphony’s general manager for Asia-Pacific, said in an interview.
“But with the rise of technology … we can take away the mundane and repetitive work, so humans can do the more sophisticated work.”
Symphony, which started life as Perzo in 2012, was launched by chief executive David Gurle as a low-cost alternative to a secured messaging tool offered by Bloomberg. About 15 months ago, it began allowing clients to build and integrate their own software with Symphony’s platform. It gives them the “keys” to their own encrypted content for data security control.
More than 1,000 so-called bots, or robots in the form of internet software, have now been embedded onto Symphony’s open platform by its clients, up from about 500 a year ago, Chan said.