Sell-Side Technology Awards 2025: Best sell-side trading communication system—Cloud9

Overview

Cloud9 is a compliance-enabled, cloud-based trader voice technology. Its scalable design maximizes efficiency by unifying communication for a global network of traders, brokers, and front-office financial services professionals. The current financial services industry faces a number of challenges, including expensive private wires, slow and inefficient processes, lack of structure and voice-monitoring capabilities, and traditional on-premises solutions. Cloud9’s continuously evolving software is designed to optimize banking infrastructure, ensuring compliance, improved efficiency, and instant connectivity.

The solution  

• Efficiency: eliminates reliance on costly private wires and connects traders globally, reducing operational burdens for borderless front-office connectivity
• Clarity and speed: shares critical information via voice, adding speed, efficiency and accuracy to daily processes
• Enhanced metadata: rich metadata and interoperability with industry partners enable structuring and monitoring of voice data, empowering workflow analysis and insights
• Cloud-based solutions: benefits from digital feature set delivering instant connectivity, whether remote or in the office

Secret sauce  

Cloud9 was built to be a cloud-native software-as-a-service (SaaS) VoIP offering, allowing it to iterate and deploy new improvements quickly to its clients. Allied with high-quality customer service, Cloud9’s users get the product, functions and support they require rapidly and efficiently.

Recent milestones

• At Symphony’s flagship Innovate conference in April 2024, the firm showcased the effectiveness of AI functionality by combining its Cloud9 platform and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI offering, providing accurate transcription and intelligence to voice trading interactions.
• Users can obtain detailed analyses with Symphony’s models, which are trained in trading floor jargon and designed to inform decisions, enhance trader efficiency, and simplify customer risk management.
• Krisp AI noise-cancelling software has been added to Cloud9 to support its transcription model, ensuring clarity in important conversations that often have noisy backgrounds.

Future objectives

As unveiled at Symphony Innovate this year, Cloud9 is launching a mobile app, extending its cloud-native VoIP trading technology to smartphones. This expansion, as requested by customers, allows traders to work remotely. The app will offer “trader voice mode” for simultaneous call listening and “mobile mode” for more controlled engagement. It will also integrate AI-powered tools such as noise suppression/canceling and transcription, previously unveiled for the desktop platform. 

Why they won

Cloud9, part of Symphony, wins the best sell-side trading communications system category in this year’s Sell-Side Technology Awards, thanks to its cloud-based trader voice technology platform. Cloud9’s DNA comes courtesy of Cloud9 Technologies, which readers might remember was acquired by Symphony in mid-2021. The firm won various WatersTechnology awards in the past and was particularly highly thought of across the industry, which made it a perfect fit for Symphony. 

The Cloud9 platform is a cloud-native SaaS and VoIP offering, which, due to its cloud technology, eliminates reliance on private wires and connects traders globally. It supports the sharing of information via voice, adding speed, efficiency and accuracy to daily processes, while its rich metadata and interoperability with industry partners enable structuring and monitoring of voice data, supporting workflow analysis and insights. These days, trading communication systems worth their salt should at the very least have mobile versions of the platform, which Cloud9 has covered as of May this year, when it announced that it was launching a mobile app that would extend its trading technology and ancillary services to smartphones. Congratulations to Cloud9 on its win and its outstanding entry.