Symphono's Drew Shields: "Our Clients Hire Us to Handle Their Hardest, Most Time-Sensitive and Most Strategic Projects"

If you've got a challenging, time-sensitive project that's of the utmost importance, you may not know where to turn. That's where Symphono comes in. Symphono is a technology consulting firm focused on technology strategy and custom software development in financial services. “We build complex, custom systems from the ground up,” says Chief Product Officer Drew Shields. “We have two core practice areas: trading and risk management infrastructure, and enterprise collaboration solutions. Our clients hire us to handle their hardest, most time-sensitive and most strategic projects.” Shields said that this generally takes the form of small, highly skilled teams, which are deployed on a project “rather than attacking in large numbers or doing staff augmentation.” “We have a track record of attracting and retaining top-tier talent, and delivering on-time and on-budget while providing clients with project transparency,” Shields adds. Trading Products “Trading System X, or TSX, is a low-latency algorithmic and market making platform for options across asset classes,” Shields revealed. “Our initial rollout has targeted market makers providing quoting, electronic eye, and complex auto-hedging capabilities with a speed and flexibility that we believe is unique in the industry. The next focus for us will be expanding our client base by helping clients deploy pure black-box algorithms inside the TSX framework.” Shields said that there are a few differentiators in what Symphono offers: “stateful algorithms, meaning that they can watch markets over time and make more elegant time-series decisions than possible in other systems; a framework for clients to write and deploy their own volatility fitting logic in our continuous auto-fitter; an API that is not ‘bolted on' but is the core driver of the system allowing clients to build their own user interfaces or integrate with external systems with access to everything we can do in our own UI.” “It's a remarkably open system that creates new possibilities for our clients' to enhance and improve their trading logic,” Shields said. Next up: Symphono Analytics, a quantitative engine that provides data “with the lowest latency possible off-the-shelf.” “It can be used in two forms,” Shields explains. “In the quantitative data feed implementation, we consume a market data feed and then publish implied volatilities, theoretical values and all the greeks. We do this with only microseconds of latency. In addition, the same continuous auto-fitter that TSX employs can be used so that clients can receive their own proprietary vol, TV, and greeks with the same latency we provide for implieds. “In the streaming form, we can consume the entire OPRA feed and publish quantitative values for it on a single server with standard hardware. No FPGA or GPU required. For firms with their own technology teams and proprietary software, we can also provide Symphono Analytics in a library form (C or Java) so that they can integrate it into their own platforms. The library itself can provide an implied vol, TV, and greeks for a single option in only 5 microseconds.” Additional Offerings “In our consulting business,” Shields continues, “one key differentiator is our experience in enterprise collaboration.” By that, Shields said that he means integrating and automating systems and trading workflows using instant messaging, group chat, etc. “We have a long history in this space and our core leadership team was part of building a product named MindAlign which was sold into many capital markets firms in the early to mid 2000s and was eventually acquired by Microsoft to be their enterprise group chat server,” he said. “We work with clients in this space to sometimes build collaboration platforms from scratch but in many cases use our experience integrating trading workflows into chat and IM to help them customize an off-the-shelf implementation, improving efficiency and reducing costs.” Engineering Greatness Though a lot of people may not know this, Symphono's team is primarily comprised of engineers. “We keep our percentage of total employees being engineers high because it's part of what makes us unique,” Shields revealed. “Our passion is solving complex problems for our clients by designing and building world class systems. We are not in this business to churn out widgets that any programmer could build. “We are proud of the expertise and quality of engineering we provide and as a result are focused on maintaining a team where everyone brings a high level of technical acumen, so much so that even our management team can contribute by designing systems and writing code.” A Growing Empire Symphono started when the company's founder, Dave Zaret, began consulting independently almost nine years ago. “What began as an independent tech strategy consultancy quickly grew into a team of top notch engineers who could deliver solutions front to back,” Shields said. “Over the last 4 years we've seen significant growth. We're now 30 people strong and still growing and are excited to see our team expand the kinds of consulting engagements we deliver and products we implement for the industry.” Investors, Take Note: There's no Shame in Admitting What You Don't Know “I'm not a trader, so I've don't have any tips or lessons learned in that area, but I would say to anyone new to this industry that you have to have no shame in not knowing something when you're trying to learn,” Shields said. “There's a lot of industry speak, acronyms, etc., and it's a complex environment to work in, but every conversation you have with someone else in the industry is a chance to learn if you're not embarrassed to ask questions. “Capital markets can be a harsh world but almost everyone I've met over the years has been quick to share something they know when I've asked questions and ultimately, the best way to learn is from people who've lived it longer than you.”