In May 2024, the U.S. capital markets made the long-awaited transition to T+1 settlement, with RegTech company Symphony playing a quiet but pivotal role. The integration of its platform with DTCC’s Central Trade Manager (CTM) gave firms the ability to resolve trade contract breaks in real time, reducing the risk of settlement failure. “The DTCC, T+1 settlement has gone well overall,” says Symphony President and CEO Ben Chrnelich. “We’re really happy and pleased with the role that we’ve played in trade resolution where there’s been breaks and related trade reconciliation issues.”
The move to T+1 had been in the making for decades with the successful transition last year demonstrating that market infrastructures and supporting technologies were finally ready for the operational shift. Attention now turns to Europe, where a 2027 deadline for accelerated settlement has been agreed. Unlike the U.S., the European landscape is fragmented across multiple central securities depositories (CSDs), exchanges, and clearing houses and Symphony is ready to build on the U.S. success and lessons learned. “It does play well for Symphony as a community-driven collaboration platform with a significant amount of data dissemination in automated workflows,” Chrnelich says.The challenge for Europe will be aligning 27 jurisdictions and multiple infrastructures. Yet Chrnelich remains optimistic. “2027 is achievable when you look at the exchanges that have significant influence. Obviously, Euronext has representation across a significant portion of the Eurozone, LSEG is another big exchange, and in our conversations with these exchanges and the firms that are driving this, 2027 is in the realm of possibility”.
DORA, Critical Third Parties, and the Resilience Test
Across Europe, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) has been a more immediate test for service providers. DORA places critical third-party information and communications technology services (ICTs) at the heart of market stability oversight. As a significant player in the post-trade ecosystem, Symphony has adopted a proactive stance: “We have spent a significant amount of time on DORA. Our General Counsel Corinna Mitchell… took the lead for the organisation in understanding the impact, assessing the workflows, and working with clients around what the impact would be,” notes Chrnelich.
DORA has sharpened focus on resilience across the services supply chain. “It’s really caused people to focus on the operational capabilities of organisations, how we protect information, how we ensure that there’s controls in place to satisfy and facilitate a consistent approach to trading and capital allocation,” he says. For Symphony, this has meant close collaboration between its legal, compliance, and security functions, with Chief Information Security Officer Mitch Hibbs leading work on data centre resiliency, backup planning, and information security.
The UK, meanwhile, has taken the definition of what makes a service provider critical to market stability further. While the EU approach focuses on identifying the largest players across the digital ecosystem, the UK framework emphasises the systemic role of ICTs in specific market segments. In the UK, you can be a relatively small firm, but if 90% of the market’s using your product, then you’ve become a critical third party”. Symphony’s response has been to double down on the message of trust and security. “Our clients can satisfy both regimes with confidence that Symphony operates in a very secure manner,” said Chrnelich.
From Messaging to Market Data
Once regarded primarily as a secure messaging platform, Symphony has evolved to become a hub for multi-channel communications and integrated data. The integration with TradingView, a fast-growing institutional market data provider underscores this.“TradingView is an institutional-level market data platform. It has hundreds of thousands of users across the globe. It’s really a platform that works well for institutional traders, individual traders, RFAs, wealth managers,” Chrnelich says. “We’ve been excited about the adoption and the usage of TradingView via Symphony since we launched it earlier this year”.
The integration means a trader at a bank or asset manager can operate entirely within Symphony: internal chat, federated communications with clients, community discussions, and access to market data—without switching platforms. “They can have direct access to a very high-quality market data platform, which from a value standpoint is a much better value for them in terms of operating expenses than a number of the other market data platforms out there,” Chrnelich argued.
Crucially, the integration reduces operational friction. “Because it’s integrated, it makes it really easy to send market data information directly to people that are part of your Symphony community. So, you’re not worried about cutting and pasting market data information into emails or screenshots,” Chrnelich added.
The firm is selective in expanding these integrations, focusing on platforms that resonate with its users. “We continue to find exciting new products that have relevance to our user community and make it easy for them to access those products through their Symphony experience”. The TradingView example hints at a strategy of embedding more content and functionality within Symphony, reducing costs for clients while reinforcing the platform’s centrality.
AI, Voice, and the Security Challenge of the Virtual Floor
Symphony’s future vision is inseparable from AI. The firm has begun applying transcription models and analytics to voice communications, a persistent blind spot for compliance monitoring. “We’re developing AI capabilities across all of our data streams… on the voice side we have transcription models and analytics that give trading managers and compliance practitioners relevant information about what’s happening across all their trading platforms,” Chrnelich explains.
The aim is to extract trading, client, and activity insights from the torrent of information flowing across trading desks every day. By capturing and analysing voice data, Symphony aims to provide managers and regulators with a clearer picture of trading behaviour whilst strengthening oversight and improving client interactions.
Video presents an even greater challenge. While Symphony enables Zoom and Teams integration with identity verification, the rise of deepfake fraud has introduced a new layer of risk. “We’ve seen examples where there’s been a deepfake video of a CFO calling somebody on video and saying please transfer this money… it looks just like that individual. The amount of fraud that happens in the global banking community is massive. It’s billions of dollars of money that leaks out because of people being able to get into these systems”.
The solution, in Symphony’s view, lies in the secure community model. Just as the physical walls of the New York Stock Exchange once provided trust through face-to-face interaction, the digital era requires robust virtual identity verification. “At one point, the community was defined by the physical nature of traders being on the floor… Now that we’re dealing with virtual walls… you need a much more robust approach to virtual identity confirmation,” Chrnelich explains.
For regulators, the frontier of video surveillance and AI-driven oversight remains largely uncharted, yet the risks of fraud and misconduct continue to escalate. Symphony is founded on verified communities as the core of its platform, creating trusted digital environments that replicate the assurance once provided by physical trading floors. By combining that foundation with AI analytics and advanced transcription, the company is positioning itself to help institutions not only meet today’s compliance obligations but also anticipate the next generation of supervisory expectations. In doing so, Symphony is signalling that secure, identity-verified collaboration will be the cornerstone of resilient market infrastructure in the years ahead.
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