AFTAs 2017: Best Partnership or Alliance—Thomson Reuters and Symphony Communications

An increase in regulatory scrutiny and legislative action, following benchmark manipulation scandals, has led capital-markets firms to actively monitor, control and archive messages sent by their employees via instant messaging. Yvette Jackson, global head of platform and partners at Thomson Reuters, says regulators have become increasingly aware of the importance of instant messaging systems in the trading lifecycle and these insights have informed many of the new regulations introduced to retain and protect the integrity of financial markets.

“Consequently, the roles of compliance officers in financial services [firms] have changed almost beyond recognition. What had long been a rulebook-based, clearly-defined role, has become all-encompassing, with compliance officers now charged with managing a myriad of issues, including culture and conduct risk, regulatory technology, market and chat surveillance capabilities, and a deluge of regulatory changes, all with an overlay of increased personal liability,” she says.

Lawrence Miller, chief security officer at Symphony, adds that the partnership directly addresses the need for a tool that meets these enterprise compliance and record-retention requirements. 

This integration, Miller says, allows firms to use Eikon and Symphony in concert, bringing together Eikon’s information and analytics capabilities with organization-wide deployments of Symphony’s communication platform. “This means staff have access to all of the information they need while collaborating in a secure, compliant fashion,” he says. 

Users of both Eikon and Symphony will be able to share Eikon content through the Symphony platform. If the recipient also has Eikon, they will also be able to share live data, news and charts to support dynamic, real-time collaboration. 

Given that the integration is achieved using application programming interfaces (APIs) on both sides, Thomson Reuters’ Jackson says the delivery of API capabilities was paramount to the success of the alliance. The Eikon side-by-side API, launched in April 2017, can connect any financial application on the desktop to Eikon, allowing users to move seamlessly between different tasks in their workflow.

Eikon users can already share Eikon content with counterparts via the Eikon Messenger platform, with 300,000 individuals in 30,000 firms across 180 countries. The Thomson Reuters- Symphony tie-up essentially gives customers the choice to extend collaboration capabilities to the Symphony community.