Brad Levy, CEO of financial markets infrastructure and communications platform Symphony, was honored with the CEO of the Year Award at the 2022 Markets Choice Awards. Levy said he was a little surprised when he received it, given that he joined the company in 2020 and has technically been in his role for less than a year.
brad levy
“I was really happy but also surprised as I hadn’t been on the pitch that long,” he said. He added that it really was a “great team effort”.
“It just doesn’t work without a phenomenal team working with me. It’s a really good thing for us as a team to receive this recognition as we move forward and get through some pretty challenging times,” he added.
Symphony was launched in 2014 as a messaging platform to solve data security and compliance, to be an open architecture platform and to facilitate real-time communication across companies. Today, the company is the common connector for market workflows with over half a million users and service providers for more than 1,000 institutions.
Symphony has made great strides since Levy joined the company: “We’ve made our strategy a little more focused. It took us seven years to build our platform and accelerated our strategy over the past year.”
In 2021, the company acquired Cloud9 Technologies, a trader voice and electronic communications company, and counterparty mapping platform StreetLinx.
In April of this year, the company launched its embedded collaboration platform (ECP), which allows companies to integrate Symphony’s communications stack with other platforms. Symphony also announced a Microsoft Teams integration, allowing users to start Teams video calls from their Symphony chats. This integration is the latest in a compliant enterprise communications offering that includes Zoom, Salesforce, WhatsApp, WeChat, and SMS.
Brad Levy at the 2022 Markets Choice Awards
For Levy, being the face of the company is fun, but also “tough. “It’s a real responsibility and I take it seriously. I think we are an important platform and there are many customers who rely on us today.”
He added that it’s an interesting space, so it’s fun to be a face of something that’s interesting and current.
For Levy, being a good person (which is part of being a good leader) requires three things: “curiosity, hard work, and teamwork.” Levy added that a good leader must be willing to look ahead: “It’s a basic requirement for a manager to have enough vision to move people forward.”
“Personally, I’m looking forward to about three years as a leader, and I think it allows me to just try to lead into a future that’s not that far away,” he added.
He went on to say that a good leader must treat people well: “It’s better to support them, not just lead them,” he stressed.
“The world needs a little more empathy and understanding,” he added.
Levy said his strengths are his experience and connections.
Prior to Symphony, Brad was a partner and senior executive at global analytics and information provider IHS Markit, having also served as CEO of MarkitSERV and global head of credit processing and software services. Earlier in his career, he spent 18 years at Goldman Sachs, most recently as Managing Director and global head of GS’s Principal Strategic Investments group.
“I have a pretty broad view of the market and technology and have become much more global over the last half of my career,” he shared.
“I’m very passionate about what I’m involved in and I want to push it forward,” he added.
Levy emphasizes that he is dependent on his team: “We have a team of people who complement each other and have different strengths and weaknesses. We all compensate each other sometimes.”
He thinks the actual result is what matters most, but you should just do what you have to do and get a lot of people involved.
“We’re going to be faster and it’s going to feel easier,” he shared of his expectations as the industry grows.
Levy said that Symphony wants to make a positive impact and believes that intention matters: if you have a good intention, you’re more likely to have a good outcome. I believe our intention is correct. We’re trying to put technology in people’s hands to really move forward,” he said.
Levy believes the scale of change and the rate of change will be dramatic over the next five years.
“We’re doing this for the industry, and I would imagine that over time we’d connect with other platforms that hit other industries,” he concluded.
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