Table of Contents

Date

Apr 5, 2018

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Agenda

Meeting notes

WQ: Nilesh, could you introduce yourself?

NB: I’ve been working on Symphony for about a year now, helping teams build chatbots and UI apps. Thanks Will for bringing me here.

JS: You say you’ve built chatbots and UI apps. Are you exchanging financial data in those, would these apps benefit from standard objects?

NB: Some of the bots do not use financial objects, but we’re helping other teams that could use those.

JS: Do they use financial data, cashtags, that sort of thing?

NB: Yes.

WQ: We’re interested in structured objects generally because being able to exchange standard data structures is useful for connecting dataflows.

JS: Sounds good. Do you have any further update, Will?

WQ: Yeah, I’d like to find a time on the 16^th and kind of do a level-set, identify existing RFQ protocols, and see what elements are core, etc.

AW: Are there many participants from New York? Useful to meet in-person?

JS: The two FactSet participants are in New York.

WQ: I’d suggest we do WebEx for the first meeting and then for a follow-up, if we want to do whiteboarding, we can do some in-person meetings.

HS: Depending on the top-of-mind data structure that we’re trying to facilitate, I think we’ll be able to get internal teams to bite, but until then I’ll be the participant and quarterback the effort.

WQ: Ok I’ll send an email right after this meeting to set something up.

JS: I’m still working on getting the LLC to come talk to us about their security object. They have a new Paul, Ken Jaeger, who’s just getting up to speed with everything, and then he and Gordon, the partner product manager will come talk to us about their roadmap and listen to our questions. It’s an action I still need to sort out time-wise.

The RFQ update, I’ve heard rumors about a subgroup similar to the RFQ group but for trades, but Aaron maybe you’ve heard something?

AW: I think Will might have more info.

WQ: Yeah, there have been early conversations with Ali and Hammad at Citi that we’d like to bring to the larger group once they’ve gotten a little more concrete.

JS: There’s some question about how this group will transform as Symphony Foundation becomes FINOS, what the group’s focus will be. What is a financial object? What do the existing participants want to get out of it? I think that as the scope of the program is defined, we give that some thought. I think the standardization started very much with a Symphony focus, but has now moved on to be more about passing structured data between applications to help workflow. So I’d like to do a quick walkaround the table to see what people would like to see achieved in a year’s time. Hershal?

HS: I like this. At the last board meeting’s executive session focusing on goals, we focused on collaboration across multiple firms. I think that if this group got to agreement on one complex object and it was implemented on multiple platforms, I think that would be a big win.

JS: I like that. I think security interoperability is a key item for anything to work. Then we can get these bigger structures defined.

WQ: I agree, it’s the package of data structures necessary to support a single workflow. One thing I want to throw out there – data models have been thrown out there, but what the important thing is that the inputs and outputs are well-defined by these objects and support workflows. “Data models” is a little intimidating.

JS: Yeah, I agree. It implies a complexity that should not be our focus. The objects should be human readable in their structure.

HS: The simple way I think about it is that a data model lives within an application, but a standard object should be abstracted from that data model as a simple structured object stripping out anything incidental or proprietary.

JS: Is there still interest in being able to view these objects in a nice way in Symphony, or do we see Symphony just as a transport layer between applications?

HS: I’d say it’s useful to think of Symphony both as a transport and a consumer, but just one of many.

AW: Yeah, I’d say Symphony’s line on this is ultimately correct—while we want to support and would want nice rendering by endpoints, this group’s focus should be on the objects themselves and agnostic as to rendering.

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