Can Google and Symphony's AI Joint Venture Boost Banking Compliance?

Symphony, a market infrastructure and tech company, announced it is collaborating with Google to enhance its voice analytics service for financial institutions, banks and investment firms. This comes in response to the increasingly stringent compliance regulations in the sector.

The failure to monitor financial business-related text messages transmitted across unapproved platforms in previous years has been responsible for over $2 billion in fines levied by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This is because financial institutions are reportedly retaining only a portion of text and email communications.

Symphony, which has 1,000 clients, including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, will improve its Cloud9 voice product with more advanced speech-to-text and NLP capabilities using Vertex AI, Google Cloud's generative artificial intelligence platform.

“We have been on a journey with Google Cloud for the past two years, one that has been a true partnership on many fronts. We are confident that by tapping Google Cloud’s AI capabilities for voice analytics, Symphony will be able to offer the more than 1,000 institutions we serve with top notch service that will create further efficiency and innovation in financial markets,” said Symphony’s CEO, Brad Levy. 

"Generative AI has the potential to transform the trading landscape from automating routine tasks to identifying potential misconduct through anomalies in data," said Zac Maufe, global head of Regulated Industries at Google Cloud. The Cloud9 product facilitates collaboration among finance-driven teams across asset classes including commodities, interest rate swaps and equity derivatives. The transcription of customer communications for retention can be improved and suspicious interactions can then be flagged for review using Symphony’s latest tool.


So, how will the partnership between Symphony and Google play out?

In addition to transcribed and summarized discussions for compliance purposes, users can also mine data for additional insights that could impact trading, sales plans and the customer experience as a whole.

"What we're looking to do is create a platform you would use to put your stream of data in to get the insight out of your data," Brad Levy, Symphony’s CEO reported, adding that he hoped to bring the enhanced product to market by Q2 next year.

Platform vice president of global AI at Google Cloud, Phil Moyer, stated that compliance would be more "ambient" with the new system.

"Data is increasing by as much as 50% to 60% per year. So there's 180 zettabytes of data on the planet Earth right now, 90% of which has been created in the last two years. We're starting to get beyond the level that humans can handle this. And so tools like these transformers and generative AI are really helping to manage that massive data that's being created," Moyer added.


As Google and Symphony join forces in the financial arena, can their AI joint venture be the solutions banks need to manage the compliance risk in customer communications?

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