Virtual Office Resource

Two years ago this month I wrote about a company called Symphony Communication Services. The headline of my story noted the platform was considered a business version of WhatsApp. Symphony’s solution has also been compared to Slack, among other collaboration applications.

Symphony’s secure messaging and collaboration platform allows for chat, screen sharing, and video and voice calls. It integrates with Atlassian JIRA, Box (News - Alert), GitHub, Salesforce, Trello, and other third-party tools. And it began life as the first in-house chat tool at Goldman Sachs.

But this solution is someone unique in that it has catered to the financial vertical – and meeting the security and other compliance requirements of this regulated industry. This has apparently been a very successful strategy for Symphony.

Reports in May indicated the company is valued at around $1 billion. That was when Symphony raised $63 million in new capital from BNP Paribas and existing shareholders. The new funding supplemented the $170 million it previously collected from leading financial firms, venture capital firms, and Google (News - Alert).

Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Nomura are among Symphony’s customers. And its platform now serves some 235,000 subscribers, including portfolio managers, risk managers, salespeople, and traders.

To be clear, financial companies aren’t the only ones using the Symphony platform. Government, health care companies, legal firms, and others use it too.

What’s new here is that Symphony in 2018 aims to make a formal push beyond the financial vertical.

As it gears up for this expansion, Symphony continues to grow its product portfolio. In October the company added the ability for Symphony platform users to provide select external clients with a secure channel to internal employees. The new Symphony Embedded Chat Module allows for secure messaging to be embedded into any website or third-party application. The company in October also announced a range of other platform improvements.