The Evolution Of Communication Tools And Data

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Data security and the evolution of tech

Hiten Patel

8 min read

I think we're not even started yet on the speed of change driven by data. I think it's just the beginning of that for our industry
Brad Levy, CEO of Symphony

Symphony CEO, Brad Levy, joins our host, Hiten Patel, to discuss the impact of technology on the financial industry, with a focus on data and artificial intelligence (AI). Brad shares his view that data is the new front office and that the industry is only starting to leverage its power. He discusses the potential of AI and its transformative effect on people's capacity to process and generate information, as well as the advantages of in-person work over remote work.

Key talking points:

  • Reflecting on Brad’s career journey, including his time at Goldman Sachs and Markit, with a focus on the challenges he has encountered in his career and the importance of learning from mistakes.
  • The benefits of working for large firms versus startups, and how his past roles shape his and his colleagues’ approach. 
  • The value of partnerships and relationships in the industry. Brad advocates for individuals to venture outside, be physically present, and learn from observing others in the workplace. 
  • Three individuals and companies that impress Brad: Thomas Kurian at Google, Lance Uggla at Beyond Net Zero, and Sheila Sarum at BASTA.

This episode is part of our Innovators' Exchange series. Tune in to hear the latest discussions around financial software and technology industry developments, data complexity, and implications of AI in financial industry.

This episode was recorded in May 2023

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Hiten Patel

Thank you, Brad, for joining us.

Brad Levy

Thank you so much for having me, Hiten. Really happy to be here.

Hiten Patel

Probably did do your intro just right there, Brad, you've got a pretty long history in the industry. Why don't you do a better job for me in picking out the highlights of the last 10, 20, I may say 30? But it might offend you. Let's say 20 years.

Brad Levy

No, 31 years. It's fine. I wear it. It's the wisdom. Yes. So 20 years on Wall Street. Most of it at Goldman Sachs, where I, from 2000 on was in e commerce and ran the Strategic Investments team where I was involved in a number of initiatives across the street, consortiums of all kinds, whether it’s FX, ICE, trade web, swaps clear, swaps wire, market, etc.

I left in 2011-12 to join Markit, one of our portfolio companies. We had, I guess pre-IPO, but I joined that company to become an operator of market infrastructure, market structure. Obviously most know who Markit is, now part of S&P. We went public, we were merged with IHS in 16. I spent eight years there where I left toward the end of 19 and started up at Symphony in July 20 where I've been CEO since just about two years now in June.

Hiten Patel

Amazing. Amazing. What keeps you so young and hungry for this space still, after 30 years?

Brad Levy

Well, it's interesting. I mean, at a minimum,  I've tried to maybe be a little bit out on the edge, not like the bleeding edge of the future, but just trying to stay ahead a bit and I think just that act probably keeps you a bit more interested when you're sort of moving into the future versus, you know, maybe just trying to stay a bit more static.

So I've always sort of been moving forward a bit. Tech has been part of my career really since I started as a banker in the nineties using Lotus, Excel, cc: Mail before the Internet, before cell phones, literally. So yeah, I just thought, you know, why not stay out there if it worked for my first ten years? And it probably keeps me a bit more interested in what I'm doing, tech is obviously a big impact in the world and finance is not alone.

And in fact, it might be one of the bigger planet drivers, FinTech in the next decade or so, which is pretty cool.

Hiten Patel

Awesome. And tell me a little bit more about what drew you to Symphony. What drew you to that next challenge in your career?

Brad Levy

Well, I think product is interesting, running something that's a heavy product and not the easiest technology collaboration, running to the edge of people's Wi Fi and be performant, etc. But I'd been in this sort of identity chat space for now over 20 years where I was involved in an initiative, a company led communicator that was a technology platform that Markit acquired in 06.

So I worked on a system called Hub IM back in 03, launched that, it didn't work. At Markit we shut that product down in 08. I built another product at Markit, Directory Service that ultimately sold to Symphony in 14. So I was always in the space of collaboration, chat and identity. I believe in security, data protection, etc. and I had the opportunity to join the company a couple of years ago, brought on by the founder CEO at that time, David Gourlay. So it's been a bit something I've been involved in the same amount of time I've been involved in maybe post-trade or clearing or data or just other streams of market structure, communications is a really interesting field. And, you know, we're bringing a lot together, including some data science assets, which we could talk about a bit.

Hiten Patel

Awesome, and just for the benefit of those listeners who are not familiar with Symphony, I know the company has evolved, how would you describe it in a moment or so around how you got people to think of Symphony?

Brad Levy

I'll try to use a few words. You know, a couple of years ago, I think we were really we were in collaboration very directly with a chat screen share file, file share stack, you know, comparable to maybe a Slack with Zoom or teams overall. But we've evolved quite a bit since then. We've acquired some companies, so now we are a platform for sure, not just an application on the desktop but a modern platform with quite a bit in the back end, extensible, etc. We are a communications platform, I would say now because collaboration has to be in the field of communication. But we also have a voice business Cloud 9 that we acquired in trader voice. So I think we're a platform that is led by communication and now we have some interesting assets that we're working with in identity.

A company called StreetLinx, we acquired to build profiles that are more granular so you can sift and sort the data coming at you or put your intent out, and then a true NLP and machine learning platform amenity. That's a data science, you know, sentiment reader of earnings calls and ESG data, etc. So, you know, we're definitely a platform.

We have about 20 products that we quote unquote sell. One of them is the core access to Symphony. Another one is Cloud nine Trader Voice. But we really try to operate as a seamless platform that it could all work together or could work in its pieces. So, we are 600,000 users on the system across about 1000 institutions global and cutting across the front, middle and back-office workflows and partnering our way through that in a meaningful way this year and last.

Hiten Patel

Great, sounds super exciting. And one of the things we struggle with as advisors to this space is it's often easy to point the trends in the direction of travel are easy to call and see. One of the things we really wrestle with is kind of trying to understand that pace of change, that pace of adoption.

One of the things that's always been a challenge a little bit, particularly around traded markets, capital markets, is sometimes that resistance to change. Like how much are you seeing a willingness to kind of embrace some of those capabilities you describe? Is it slowing down? Is it accelerating? How are you navigating some of that?

Brad Levy

I think on the surface, humans create patterns and then don't like to break them, good or bad, right habits, addictions, whatever. So I think once you create a pattern, it's hard to get humans away from it. I think that's just a feature of planet with us on it. The pandemic was definitely an accelerant to technology push.

I'd say in general, whether it's cloud mobility, where remote work platforms were distributed were encrypted end to end. So a lot of the things that were already in play five or ten years ago were definitely accelerated by the pandemic. I would say the co-mingling of different animal types now across the spectrum, whether it's players like us that are scale ups or true fintech startups or big market infrastructure players like exchanges or parts of big asset managers like Aladdin

And then you get into Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Salesforce, like everybody's now in on the financial services game, capital markets included, as well as retail. And then you just have moments like November 30th 2022 where ChatGPT kind of just occurs to people that it exists. It's been in the works for many years. A.I. is not new, but just this consumerization.

It's almost like when the BlackBerry went into retail and everybody got a full keyboard and then my mom could now text me because it went from that crazy way to text to an actual typing keyboard. Yeah, like that's when I knew that the firewall was broken. My mom now was in my tech stream where she wasn't before, and it just went mass market techs went mass market immediately when BlackBerry became an accessible device outside of corporate.

Brad Levy

And it's like there are these moments that builds and then boom. And I think we're not even like started yet on the speed of change driven by data. I think it's just the beginning of that for our industry. You know, we're big market data users, but we're not big data users when you really boil it down to the big data science.

Hiten Patel

And you always do a great job of exciting me, creating pictures and visions. Don't let me down here so ChatGPT like your view on that in a relatively closed industry right, relatively protected industry ,traded market traders etc. you see it having much change is it overblown, overhyped or is this something really, really, different about to happen?

Brad Levy

Oh, I think it's different this time, but impact will be dramatic and so similar to other times. But you know, I don't know. It could be printing press level type transformation for like humans, like ability of people to both consume and produce, which obviously, you know, printing press was version one, Internet was sort of version two, taking up a little bit of a leap there.

But yeah, I think it's big and I think it's not that obviously there are systems that could be very public and widely distributed and consumer level and accessing everything that's in the indexed Internet, which is I think maybe 5% of what's really out there, 95% of the quote, “Internet” is below the glass, not searchable, you know, on the darknet or just closed systems, telecoms.

So there'll be very private versions of these technologies that will only be accessible by you, companies that will do very well, I think, are companies that have a lot of data already where they just need to be served up the models and the compute, which I think Google, Microsoft, all these folks will do a good job at serving confidential compute environments for them.

So you get the scale, you get the benefit, but you don't have to pile your data into a whole of, you know, public, you know, AI, natural, you know, large language models. So like if you think of Tesla's lead in self-driving, like they just have so much data where JP Morgan as a bank, these people have so much data to work with.

Now they're going to be within the bounds of what they have rights to do, but that's still a lot of meta or connections or trends like Jamie Dimon and Elon Musk. You just listen to them because they have so much access to information. At a minimum, they may be dumb, but their data makes them wise. Not saying either of them are dumb, by the way, especially Jamie Dimon.

He's a key partner for us. Like their data, but they're not going to just shift that, you know, throw that into Google. They're not going to allow their people to go into chat GPT native, we think we have a role of providing a safe, secure gateway that is trusted, that is on desktops and built for these workflows ultimately and bots and people and applications working together across modules.

So maybe that's a little bit of a visual for you on a venning of confidential compute wrapper, your private data inside pulling in public data sets that makes sense at that moment, leveraging the tools and assets that you want either procured or built, or both. And that's going to be the bigger environment, the private environments, leveraging compute from mega techs and the models themselves, maybe in open source, I would argue.

Hiten Patel

It definitely feels pretty groundbreaking and revolutionary. I had one of my teams sent me a document the other day to review at any point to me afterwards that there was a page or two in there that they'd use chat GPT to produce. And I was a little bit like oh so you guys are messing around with this stuff.

And I got the reply back. “Well, didn't you used to use Excel when you used to drive the modelling?” I was like, absolutely. And so this is, this is already been viewed as a call to kind of mess around and experiment with. So I suspect it's not just the financial services, professional services as a whole, I think.

Brad Levy

The whole services world, journalists, modelers like when I was first starting to use Lotus, I had to write macros and overlay the formatting program called Always to get bold and fonting. Then I got Excel and it gave me all of that. But I was still writing macros and then I was able to just record my actions, write a macro through Visual Basic, change range names, and I was like a hero in the mid-nineties, but I was just literally leveraging a tool that was embedded in the thing that you just had a dropdown, a few menus, and I've made a print macro that I was like hero of the analysts because you could just hit the button and it printed and got all your ranges right and your sizings of columns. Like that was a simple tool that changed my career actually in the nineties as a banker. I also got a Pentium computer, which my model went from 9 hours to one hour to run. The people that had 486s were literally nine times slower than me, like overnight. And I was in charge of doling out the 586s, which was pretty awesome as a first year associate.

Hiten Patel

Awesome, awesome. So let's just pivot a little bit, Brad. I guess we talked a little bit about the future and what's coming down the pipe. Let's just take a look backwards. I am keen on this show to make sure that people can learn and benefit from some of those who've been very successful in driving change and driving impacts.

Hiten Patel

And I'm aware that it's not all a bed of roses and not everything just falls at your feet no matter how it seems. Talk to me a little bit around some of the challenges that you've faced. What are some of the most interesting things you've had to overcome? And what do you think others would benefit from knowing a little bit more about.

Brad Levy

Well, it is definitely cliche, but you definitely learn more from your mistakes or when things go badly. Like I lived sort of through 87, I was old enough, you know, certainly and kind of changed the path, you know, where I was going to college a bit just based on the event. 94 was a very local event that the fixed income markets blew up and I had just gotten to Goldman. 98, there were big financial blow ups, 2001 the e-commerce bubble. 2008, I was pretty active in helping the credit derivatives market develop in the subprime indices and all of that. So, I personally have learned a lot from when things don't go as planned and you actually have to make a move left or right.

Like I joined an e-commerce team at Goldman in June 2000, the e-commerce bubble burst big and it was a four letter word like derivatives after 98 and long term capital, I stayed with derivatives. I stayed with e-commerce. It probably turned out to be the right path. But those were a year or two of like, am I in a seat that even exists as an e-commerce person?

Fortunately, I was on the fixed side versus equities. Equities really got pushed more around as the dot com bubble imploded and market making changed, where FICC just started its journey on things like trade web ice, FX all, broker tech and things that I was involved in then that were again electronic trading, which people didn't want to talk about in 02-03.

So yeah, I think those moments where I've lost or something's not going according to plan, I've definitely learned more from those mistakes then, because you can then win and if you try to replicate the wins constantly, like the wins generally don't come from the same place for the same reason. So you want to replicate your wins. That's hard to do and you tend not to want to lose, learn from your losses, and both are directionally wrong.

So I would definitely say dot com bubble burst, sort of financial crisis of 08, clearing, Dodd-Frank, all of that and just having to do things and then choosing some things around that. You know, when you have to compromise or make choices, it's probably healthy. No different than not having endless supplies of money through low interest rate policy, like it's just healthy to have limitations and be pushed.

And those are the moments that have served me best. Having done it at Goldman and Markit, to be honest, in a lot of those environments, those are great firms with great teams and you know, definitely having that through those moments was huge.

Hiten Patel

So tell me a little bit about you. You are one of the few people out there that can draw upon experiences of sitting with the benefits of a giant brand or behemoth from the days at Goldman through to starting out again from scratch. What's it like, compare and contrast for me a little bit on either side of those fences?

Like what's the benefit of being with a giant? What's the benefit from being on the outside and, and challenging?

Yeah, well, the leap from going from Goldman to Markit was a change because at a minimum I had to become more vendor, service, selling oriented. And to be honest, just taking it like at Goldman, you can push a bit more just as a firm and a brand and a role in driving consortium when you sort of are one of those, right, and you're sort of on the receiving end, you just got to figure out how to shapeshift same people, same conversations. But I have to now play a different role. That was a year or two of adjustment, I'd say becoming a vendor, a provider, from sitting at Goldman. But at the same time, you know, I'd made transitions that were somewhat easy and logical.

Where I went to a company I knew well, Markit was, I don't think your average vendor. We ran pretty hard and, you know, we tended to think of ourselves as not subservient maybe to the client as much as a partner. So, I think that was healthy. Lance Uggla, if you know him like he is just nobody that's going to take orders from many.

But he's an amazing person who brings people around him. So that was a eight year transition out of Goldman. That worked pretty well. And it was a more than a thousand people at the firm. I ended it was 15,000 people at IHS. So that is a smallish firm, we ran small. Moving to Boulder, Colorado was a bigger challenge for me actually when I joined Markit personally than leaving Goldman.

In hindsight, I didn't realize the shift of life from Jersey to Colorado was a much bigger deal to my family. That's a learning lesson, by the way. I kind of made a leap and it, you know, that was a harder one. I did get back to Jersey and now I'm at Symphony, which is again, I built an asset that was acquired by Symphony.

I know the space. It's a consortium of a lot of the people I've worked with. My team, actually, the people that worked for me at Goldman are actually my board members now, right? So it's like, you know, it's a small world. Relationships are important, don't burn bridges. So yeah, it's been a logical journey in hindsight, almost every move I made seemed risky or didn't make as much sense as it did in hindsight, maybe, and it's a 600 person company now doing big things globally. And you know, we acquire cool companies and it's a playbook I've been a part of writing, I guess, for 20 or 25 years in market structure, so it's fun to actually drive it.

Hiten Patel

You said something very interesting that you talked about the shift from service or vendor provider to partner. One of the things we've observed, particularly over the last 15 years post global financial crisis, is a little bit of that levelling up between the risk takers, all the risk managers, whether you're an asset manager or sell side trader and all those other providers that enable you selling the data, the technology providing the infrastructure. So share with me, how have you found that transition between the way that some of those providers are being viewed in the industry, some of the talent flows that have gone on over the last decade? You know, you've ridden that wave. Talk to me a little bit how you see that and how that's played out in your mind over the last decade or so?

Brad Levy

Yeah, I mean, 15 years ago you just did not see people going to vendors from banks or buy sides really in a meaningful way. Couple of guys I know, women like not a lot, ten years ago was not even a thing I'd say in the last few, maybe blockchain maybe brought that and crypto, there's been a lot more and granted a lot of people that hasn't worked out yet for them.

But in the last ten years, I'd say the wave of people from street to somewhere has been more in that digital asset world, which has been interesting. You've had just a lot more movement across industry, you know, like I see a lot more former Goldman and JPMorgan people at other banks now. You just didn't see that a lot, whether you know, Bank of New York or Deutsche Bank

But you saw them, they would either kind of go into the Hamptons ether like they would just disappear into the golf courses or they went to government or maybe they went to the buy side or started up a hedge fund. But the last few years, for sure, you've seen a lot of the street moving. There's been a lot of dislocations and change.

That's people movement. You know, it drives people movement. But I think tech is now a front office thing. You know, operations is now much more important to the whole business. These are things that really were just not said ten years ago. I mean, a person that's a good example. Robin Vince, who's now the CEO of Bank of New York Mellon, he ran the money markets business.

He then ran operations. He was very close with Bank of New York because Goldman and Bank of New York have a tight relationship for banking and repo and all of that. Eventually, he makes his way to Bank of New York and is now CEO. And there's a number of Goldman people that have joined there. So he went on this path of operations is important.

He went from front office to back, which when he did that kind of did not happen. Like you had somebody that was running a front office business and went to run operations and it made him much more rounded and skilled, I think, and was a good partner for me back in the day. And yeah, I think there's just so much more movement now.

And even to the Microsofts and the Googles and the AWS right. You've got people going there from the street in, you know, Phil Venables, Goldman Sachs CISO ( Chief Information Security Officer) for 30 years is now CISO for the Google Cloud, he's been there for a few years. Yeah there's so there's I love this because that's how we're going to cross-pollinate and get a lot of these things working more together because you sort of alluded to I'll finish on this We are partners because we know our clients, because we were our clients.

Brad Levy

We really understand markets and workflows and not everybody in all of our businesses. But there's a heavy dose of people that have been on the street. So stylistically or just knowledge wise, we're not just providing a service that they figure out how to use. We're trying to get their service to them by knowing how they could use it because we've done some of their jobs.

Hiten Patel

Yeah, again, something you struck a chord that tech is now a front office thing. I think that is a really interesting and powerful statement, right? There was a period a few years ago where I was just observing,  we were just observing as a firm a lot of the technology talent, leaving the banks and walking into some of these privately backed companies where they've gone.

Brad Levy

Or big tech firms getting good paydays and remote work galore.

Hiten Patel

Yeah, and be the star of the show, right?

Brad Levy

Yeah. Rather than being the service provider and being subservient, you're actually the star of the show. The revenue or the value creator. Suddenly they become the new center.

So I think that might even be day. I'm going to give you a new one because I just thought of it like this is hot off the press. I'm going to hashtag it. And I think tech was the new front office 3 to 5 years ago and exploded into the pandemic. I think data is the new like the data conversation is everything.

And if you're in ops, you need better data. If you're in front office, you've always had good data, but it's very partial, it's market data and it's what people give you versus the sea of unstructured data that's just waiting like your telephone calls transcribed into signals that you could produce just for your own self. It may be creepy for a corporate to say, I'm listening to you, but I'd love to know how many times I say AI in the last year on my phone calls.

It's not a lot, but when I say it, it's probably a few moments and I'd like to even know and maybe even the tone of the conversation and the person on the other side has changed to a downer when I said AI because it's a flywheel buzzword that's pissing people off already.

Hiten Patel

Well, look, we’ll definitely take your hashtag and remember that one. I think that's definitely true, right? That the shift from tech to data is a focus. For me, one of the key bellwethers is conversations we have with the private equity world. And there was clearly a period for a couple of decades, but it was all software, software, software, software.

You know, it was all about look at that as a core business model and build up upon that. You’re starting to see the pivot now where it is data, data, data, data.

Brad Levy

You know, it's a little like Salesforce as a great company with great products, but Salesforce with bad data and it is really, really painful. Again, I was born into a world where my software was installed hard on a machine only accessible to be upgraded by floppy, maybe a serial port plug in. And my data was a three and a quarter inch.

You know, that was my data, my model, my data and my application. It was all a very localized thing. I think it's coming back to that. It's going to be super local with sensors and compute and data. Just your data in an AI machine, your data in your firm in an AI machine, your data in your industry in an AI machine, you should be building from the middle.

I think that's Web 3.0, by the way, Web 3.0. I don't think it's 3D. I don't think it's immersion. It's not goggles. I think it's data security at a local level. So I don't have to give up my life to anybody to buy chewing gum or get a bank loan.

Hiten Patel

Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. I'm going to shift gears a touch now, Brad, and kind of step out a little bit from the professional world and reflects a little bit on the personal world. And what do you do outside of, you know, geeking out on markets structure, tech and data? Be great if you could reflect a little bit on what you do outside the professional sphere and how has that helped you or informed you in the day-to-day professional role?

Brad Levy

I'll be cliche again, but family first, I've got a great wife and two kids. Actually I'm out of, as of next month I will have no teenagers anymore, which is mind bending. I have a daughter who's graduating college, which is amazing. I think I spend too much time at work. I spend too much time traveling, I spend too much time looking at my phone when

I should be eating dinner with them. But it is the thing that is just the most important and definitely I like my kids like we have fun. You know, that kind of goes into numbers two and three, which is somewhere between yoga and snowboarding. Like, I think it's the same thing where it's a bit of a meditation where I have to be present.

Brad Levy

Like if I'm riding on my board, I pretty much have to be there or I'm probably going to die. Yoga just kind of gets you there naturally by part of the process. So one is called active meditation for savage joy. One is just doing yoga. So yeah, I'd say for ten years on yoga and for 25 ish on the board, and it's the thing I found with my buddies who I ride with every year for 20 years on the, you know, on the snow or Markit was a heavy skiing snowboarding company, did a lot of good stuff at the mountain just having fun.

And it's a community you want to be around like people that are fit, people that want to be on vacation and ride. There's like, I like to lay on the beach, by the way, that's probably a solid number three, and I like to be at the ocean and all of that. So yeah, I just think simple stuff. I really am not, you know, I travel too much.

I'm interested in seeing the world, but, you know, my family, staying healthy and enjoying my job is just kind of what and probably in that order.

Hiten Patel

Awesome. The next time we have a meeting and I see your eyes glazing over, I know you're daydreaming about careering down some mountain out in Colorado.

Brad Levy

I did stop mountain biking. It was a little too dangerous. I was balancing my risk reward, mountain biking, snowboarding. But yeah, no, it's anyway, it's really, you know, you got to do these things. Work life balance has never been more important, and especially with the tech crush, which we're trying to be part of, but minimize the anxiety producing part of it.

Hiten Patel

And then just thinking forward to the next generation. Given you've mentioned the age of your children, I guess what career guidance are you giving them as they kind of go out entering the workforce.

Brad Levy

Go outside. Literally go outside like go outside and play, go to work, learn from watching people physically in an office, get dressed and commute. Not saying pound into the office 9 to 5 like Dolly Parton, you know, back in the day, dating myself with a movie. But you know, there's a purpose to connecting with people physically. You do different connections physically you learn more. I learned a lot by showing up to work at Lehman and Goldman in the nineties and, you know, at Markit. And you know leaders, you know, for the first ten years of your life, you learn a lot by apprenticeship. And I think the pandemic has kind of pushed people to think you just don't need to connect with people physically or show up or go outside.

And again, it's not about pounding in to commute every day, but it's important to just be physical with people and get to know them on a three dimensional level where you can actually like exchange like, this is great. I love Zoom. It's efficient. I feel, you know, I know you well though you and I know each other on this call because we've had a thousand conversations already physically.

So it's a different call because we can do two dimensional because we know 3D. And I think it's just really important to go outside and show up for work and be present. And it's more fun anyway.

Hiten Patel

Yeah. One thing that struck me, one of my colleagues was telling me that we've now got a couple of managers coming through in our business that may be Zoom native that haven't led or driven business meetings in person and it's like we need to kind of close this skill gap or reskill. So I yeah, I don't think we fully process kind of what's, what's going on, what it means.

I think better we benefit from straddling the pre and post COVID era.

Brad Levy

And that’s why I like being this gen X I sort of was born into no tech and am now in heavy tech, but I'm still young enough to kind of figure it out like it's, you know, the digital natives are great, you need them, but they're definitely they don't understand the value of physical as much. And I think they could replicate, which someday you can and that's maybe a world we don't even live in, to be honest.

Hiten Patel

Yeah, Yeah. So look then as we've come to a close. One of the things we like to do on the show is just to throw the spotlight or we trying to raise awareness on pretty interesting and exciting things happening across the financial infrastructure and tech community. So I was going to ask you if you could throw the spotlight on an individual or a company that's impressing you the most right now that you think that listeners should be paying attention or looking up?

Brad Levy

I'm going to give you three fast. So Google and what they're doing Thomas Kurian and the cloud. And AI know that there's a whole kind of thing going on there, you know, with the mega techs. But, you know, I spend real time there. I think all companies will push people around to their benefit at times. But Thomas Kurian at Google, who's just released, you know, that was a big part of the splash last week.

I think Lance Uggla from Beyond Net Zero. Who's my guy from Markit. And I've just grown up with him. He's running a climate fund now, which is awesome. $5 billion climate fund from GA that is called Beyond Net Zero. And then one other is Sheila Sarum at BASTA, who I met at Markit, but we work with her now.

She runs a program for first generation grads that just don't even know what it means to be professional. It's kind of so they really groom them from a much younger age to just give them general skills that they don’t benefit from having, so where nobody in their family has graduated from college. So they, you know, I'm actually a first generation of my little family. And it's people of color and it's a New York City kind of thing. So she is doing really good work at BASTA, doing the hard work to try to create opportunities for people that don't even know what exists.

Hiten Patel

That's awesome. That's awesome, that’s great to call out. Well, look, you didn't disappoint Brad. Always enjoy our conversations. Thank you for taking us on a whirlwind tour of three and a half inch floppy disks to learning scripting all the way through to snowboarding down a mountain. So I appreciate you taking the time out of your day, sharing your thoughts with us, and look forward to catching up.

Brad Levy

Thanks for having me and see you in the future.

Hiten Patel

Cheers Brad.

This episode was recorded in May 2023.

    Symphony CEO, Brad Levy, joins our host, Hiten Patel, to discuss the impact of technology on the financial industry, with a focus on data and artificial intelligence (AI). Brad shares his view that data is the new front office and that the industry is only starting to leverage its power. He discusses the potential of AI and its transformative effect on people's capacity to process and generate information, as well as the advantages of in-person work over remote work.

    Key talking points:

    • Reflecting on Brad’s career journey, including his time at Goldman Sachs and Markit, with a focus on the challenges he has encountered in his career and the importance of learning from mistakes.
    • The benefits of working for large firms versus startups, and how his past roles shape his and his colleagues’ approach. 
    • The value of partnerships and relationships in the industry. Brad advocates for individuals to venture outside, be physically present, and learn from observing others in the workplace. 
    • Three individuals and companies that impress Brad: Thomas Kurian at Google, Lance Uggla at Beyond Net Zero, and Sheila Sarum at BASTA.

    This episode is part of our Innovators' Exchange series. Tune in to hear the latest discussions around financial software and technology industry developments, data complexity, and implications of AI in financial industry.

    This episode was recorded in May 2023

    Subscribe for more on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google | Podscribe

    Hiten Patel

    Thank you, Brad, for joining us.

    Brad Levy

    Thank you so much for having me, Hiten. Really happy to be here.

    Hiten Patel

    Probably did do your intro just right there, Brad, you've got a pretty long history in the industry. Why don't you do a better job for me in picking out the highlights of the last 10, 20, I may say 30? But it might offend you. Let's say 20 years.

    Brad Levy

    No, 31 years. It's fine. I wear it. It's the wisdom. Yes. So 20 years on Wall Street. Most of it at Goldman Sachs, where I, from 2000 on was in e commerce and ran the Strategic Investments team where I was involved in a number of initiatives across the street, consortiums of all kinds, whether it’s FX, ICE, trade web, swaps clear, swaps wire, market, etc.

    I left in 2011-12 to join Markit, one of our portfolio companies. We had, I guess pre-IPO, but I joined that company to become an operator of market infrastructure, market structure. Obviously most know who Markit is, now part of S&P. We went public, we were merged with IHS in 16. I spent eight years there where I left toward the end of 19 and started up at Symphony in July 20 where I've been CEO since just about two years now in June.

    Hiten Patel

    Amazing. Amazing. What keeps you so young and hungry for this space still, after 30 years?

    Brad Levy

    Well, it's interesting. I mean, at a minimum,  I've tried to maybe be a little bit out on the edge, not like the bleeding edge of the future, but just trying to stay ahead a bit and I think just that act probably keeps you a bit more interested when you're sort of moving into the future versus, you know, maybe just trying to stay a bit more static.

    So I've always sort of been moving forward a bit. Tech has been part of my career really since I started as a banker in the nineties using Lotus, Excel, cc: Mail before the Internet, before cell phones, literally. So yeah, I just thought, you know, why not stay out there if it worked for my first ten years? And it probably keeps me a bit more interested in what I'm doing, tech is obviously a big impact in the world and finance is not alone.

    And in fact, it might be one of the bigger planet drivers, FinTech in the next decade or so, which is pretty cool.

    Hiten Patel

    Awesome. And tell me a little bit more about what drew you to Symphony. What drew you to that next challenge in your career?

    Brad Levy

    Well, I think product is interesting, running something that's a heavy product and not the easiest technology collaboration, running to the edge of people's Wi Fi and be performant, etc. But I'd been in this sort of identity chat space for now over 20 years where I was involved in an initiative, a company led communicator that was a technology platform that Markit acquired in 06.

    So I worked on a system called Hub IM back in 03, launched that, it didn't work. At Markit we shut that product down in 08. I built another product at Markit, Directory Service that ultimately sold to Symphony in 14. So I was always in the space of collaboration, chat and identity. I believe in security, data protection, etc. and I had the opportunity to join the company a couple of years ago, brought on by the founder CEO at that time, David Gourlay. So it's been a bit something I've been involved in the same amount of time I've been involved in maybe post-trade or clearing or data or just other streams of market structure, communications is a really interesting field. And, you know, we're bringing a lot together, including some data science assets, which we could talk about a bit.

    Hiten Patel

    Awesome, and just for the benefit of those listeners who are not familiar with Symphony, I know the company has evolved, how would you describe it in a moment or so around how you got people to think of Symphony?

    Brad Levy

    I'll try to use a few words. You know, a couple of years ago, I think we were really we were in collaboration very directly with a chat screen share file, file share stack, you know, comparable to maybe a Slack with Zoom or teams overall. But we've evolved quite a bit since then. We've acquired some companies, so now we are a platform for sure, not just an application on the desktop but a modern platform with quite a bit in the back end, extensible, etc. We are a communications platform, I would say now because collaboration has to be in the field of communication. But we also have a voice business Cloud 9 that we acquired in trader voice. So I think we're a platform that is led by communication and now we have some interesting assets that we're working with in identity.

    A company called StreetLinx, we acquired to build profiles that are more granular so you can sift and sort the data coming at you or put your intent out, and then a true NLP and machine learning platform amenity. That's a data science, you know, sentiment reader of earnings calls and ESG data, etc. So, you know, we're definitely a platform.

    We have about 20 products that we quote unquote sell. One of them is the core access to Symphony. Another one is Cloud nine Trader Voice. But we really try to operate as a seamless platform that it could all work together or could work in its pieces. So, we are 600,000 users on the system across about 1000 institutions global and cutting across the front, middle and back-office workflows and partnering our way through that in a meaningful way this year and last.

    Hiten Patel

    Great, sounds super exciting. And one of the things we struggle with as advisors to this space is it's often easy to point the trends in the direction of travel are easy to call and see. One of the things we really wrestle with is kind of trying to understand that pace of change, that pace of adoption.

    One of the things that's always been a challenge a little bit, particularly around traded markets, capital markets, is sometimes that resistance to change. Like how much are you seeing a willingness to kind of embrace some of those capabilities you describe? Is it slowing down? Is it accelerating? How are you navigating some of that?

    Brad Levy

    I think on the surface, humans create patterns and then don't like to break them, good or bad, right habits, addictions, whatever. So I think once you create a pattern, it's hard to get humans away from it. I think that's just a feature of planet with us on it. The pandemic was definitely an accelerant to technology push.

    I'd say in general, whether it's cloud mobility, where remote work platforms were distributed were encrypted end to end. So a lot of the things that were already in play five or ten years ago were definitely accelerated by the pandemic. I would say the co-mingling of different animal types now across the spectrum, whether it's players like us that are scale ups or true fintech startups or big market infrastructure players like exchanges or parts of big asset managers like Aladdin

    And then you get into Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Salesforce, like everybody's now in on the financial services game, capital markets included, as well as retail. And then you just have moments like November 30th 2022 where ChatGPT kind of just occurs to people that it exists. It's been in the works for many years. A.I. is not new, but just this consumerization.

    It's almost like when the BlackBerry went into retail and everybody got a full keyboard and then my mom could now text me because it went from that crazy way to text to an actual typing keyboard. Yeah, like that's when I knew that the firewall was broken. My mom now was in my tech stream where she wasn't before, and it just went mass market techs went mass market immediately when BlackBerry became an accessible device outside of corporate.

    Brad Levy

    And it's like there are these moments that builds and then boom. And I think we're not even like started yet on the speed of change driven by data. I think it's just the beginning of that for our industry. You know, we're big market data users, but we're not big data users when you really boil it down to the big data science.

    Hiten Patel

    And you always do a great job of exciting me, creating pictures and visions. Don't let me down here so ChatGPT like your view on that in a relatively closed industry right, relatively protected industry ,traded market traders etc. you see it having much change is it overblown, overhyped or is this something really, really, different about to happen?

    Brad Levy

    Oh, I think it's different this time, but impact will be dramatic and so similar to other times. But you know, I don't know. It could be printing press level type transformation for like humans, like ability of people to both consume and produce, which obviously, you know, printing press was version one, Internet was sort of version two, taking up a little bit of a leap there.

    But yeah, I think it's big and I think it's not that obviously there are systems that could be very public and widely distributed and consumer level and accessing everything that's in the indexed Internet, which is I think maybe 5% of what's really out there, 95% of the quote, “Internet” is below the glass, not searchable, you know, on the darknet or just closed systems, telecoms.

    So there'll be very private versions of these technologies that will only be accessible by you, companies that will do very well, I think, are companies that have a lot of data already where they just need to be served up the models and the compute, which I think Google, Microsoft, all these folks will do a good job at serving confidential compute environments for them.

    So you get the scale, you get the benefit, but you don't have to pile your data into a whole of, you know, public, you know, AI, natural, you know, large language models. So like if you think of Tesla's lead in self-driving, like they just have so much data where JP Morgan as a bank, these people have so much data to work with.

    Now they're going to be within the bounds of what they have rights to do, but that's still a lot of meta or connections or trends like Jamie Dimon and Elon Musk. You just listen to them because they have so much access to information. At a minimum, they may be dumb, but their data makes them wise. Not saying either of them are dumb, by the way, especially Jamie Dimon.

    He's a key partner for us. Like their data, but they're not going to just shift that, you know, throw that into Google. They're not going to allow their people to go into chat GPT native, we think we have a role of providing a safe, secure gateway that is trusted, that is on desktops and built for these workflows ultimately and bots and people and applications working together across modules.

    So maybe that's a little bit of a visual for you on a venning of confidential compute wrapper, your private data inside pulling in public data sets that makes sense at that moment, leveraging the tools and assets that you want either procured or built, or both. And that's going to be the bigger environment, the private environments, leveraging compute from mega techs and the models themselves, maybe in open source, I would argue.

    Hiten Patel

    It definitely feels pretty groundbreaking and revolutionary. I had one of my teams sent me a document the other day to review at any point to me afterwards that there was a page or two in there that they'd use chat GPT to produce. And I was a little bit like oh so you guys are messing around with this stuff.

    And I got the reply back. “Well, didn't you used to use Excel when you used to drive the modelling?” I was like, absolutely. And so this is, this is already been viewed as a call to kind of mess around and experiment with. So I suspect it's not just the financial services, professional services as a whole, I think.

    Brad Levy

    The whole services world, journalists, modelers like when I was first starting to use Lotus, I had to write macros and overlay the formatting program called Always to get bold and fonting. Then I got Excel and it gave me all of that. But I was still writing macros and then I was able to just record my actions, write a macro through Visual Basic, change range names, and I was like a hero in the mid-nineties, but I was just literally leveraging a tool that was embedded in the thing that you just had a dropdown, a few menus, and I've made a print macro that I was like hero of the analysts because you could just hit the button and it printed and got all your ranges right and your sizings of columns. Like that was a simple tool that changed my career actually in the nineties as a banker. I also got a Pentium computer, which my model went from 9 hours to one hour to run. The people that had 486s were literally nine times slower than me, like overnight. And I was in charge of doling out the 586s, which was pretty awesome as a first year associate.

    Hiten Patel

    Awesome, awesome. So let's just pivot a little bit, Brad. I guess we talked a little bit about the future and what's coming down the pipe. Let's just take a look backwards. I am keen on this show to make sure that people can learn and benefit from some of those who've been very successful in driving change and driving impacts.

    Hiten Patel

    And I'm aware that it's not all a bed of roses and not everything just falls at your feet no matter how it seems. Talk to me a little bit around some of the challenges that you've faced. What are some of the most interesting things you've had to overcome? And what do you think others would benefit from knowing a little bit more about.

    Brad Levy

    Well, it is definitely cliche, but you definitely learn more from your mistakes or when things go badly. Like I lived sort of through 87, I was old enough, you know, certainly and kind of changed the path, you know, where I was going to college a bit just based on the event. 94 was a very local event that the fixed income markets blew up and I had just gotten to Goldman. 98, there were big financial blow ups, 2001 the e-commerce bubble. 2008, I was pretty active in helping the credit derivatives market develop in the subprime indices and all of that. So, I personally have learned a lot from when things don't go as planned and you actually have to make a move left or right.

    Like I joined an e-commerce team at Goldman in June 2000, the e-commerce bubble burst big and it was a four letter word like derivatives after 98 and long term capital, I stayed with derivatives. I stayed with e-commerce. It probably turned out to be the right path. But those were a year or two of like, am I in a seat that even exists as an e-commerce person?

    Fortunately, I was on the fixed side versus equities. Equities really got pushed more around as the dot com bubble imploded and market making changed, where FICC just started its journey on things like trade web ice, FX all, broker tech and things that I was involved in then that were again electronic trading, which people didn't want to talk about in 02-03.

    So yeah, I think those moments where I've lost or something's not going according to plan, I've definitely learned more from those mistakes then, because you can then win and if you try to replicate the wins constantly, like the wins generally don't come from the same place for the same reason. So you want to replicate your wins. That's hard to do and you tend not to want to lose, learn from your losses, and both are directionally wrong.

    So I would definitely say dot com bubble burst, sort of financial crisis of 08, clearing, Dodd-Frank, all of that and just having to do things and then choosing some things around that. You know, when you have to compromise or make choices, it's probably healthy. No different than not having endless supplies of money through low interest rate policy, like it's just healthy to have limitations and be pushed.

    And those are the moments that have served me best. Having done it at Goldman and Markit, to be honest, in a lot of those environments, those are great firms with great teams and you know, definitely having that through those moments was huge.

    Hiten Patel

    So tell me a little bit about you. You are one of the few people out there that can draw upon experiences of sitting with the benefits of a giant brand or behemoth from the days at Goldman through to starting out again from scratch. What's it like, compare and contrast for me a little bit on either side of those fences?

    Like what's the benefit of being with a giant? What's the benefit from being on the outside and, and challenging?

    Yeah, well, the leap from going from Goldman to Markit was a change because at a minimum I had to become more vendor, service, selling oriented. And to be honest, just taking it like at Goldman, you can push a bit more just as a firm and a brand and a role in driving consortium when you sort of are one of those, right, and you're sort of on the receiving end, you just got to figure out how to shapeshift same people, same conversations. But I have to now play a different role. That was a year or two of adjustment, I'd say becoming a vendor, a provider, from sitting at Goldman. But at the same time, you know, I'd made transitions that were somewhat easy and logical.

    Where I went to a company I knew well, Markit was, I don't think your average vendor. We ran pretty hard and, you know, we tended to think of ourselves as not subservient maybe to the client as much as a partner. So, I think that was healthy. Lance Uggla, if you know him like he is just nobody that's going to take orders from many.

    But he's an amazing person who brings people around him. So that was a eight year transition out of Goldman. That worked pretty well. And it was a more than a thousand people at the firm. I ended it was 15,000 people at IHS. So that is a smallish firm, we ran small. Moving to Boulder, Colorado was a bigger challenge for me actually when I joined Markit personally than leaving Goldman.

    In hindsight, I didn't realize the shift of life from Jersey to Colorado was a much bigger deal to my family. That's a learning lesson, by the way. I kind of made a leap and it, you know, that was a harder one. I did get back to Jersey and now I'm at Symphony, which is again, I built an asset that was acquired by Symphony.

    I know the space. It's a consortium of a lot of the people I've worked with. My team, actually, the people that worked for me at Goldman are actually my board members now, right? So it's like, you know, it's a small world. Relationships are important, don't burn bridges. So yeah, it's been a logical journey in hindsight, almost every move I made seemed risky or didn't make as much sense as it did in hindsight, maybe, and it's a 600 person company now doing big things globally. And you know, we acquire cool companies and it's a playbook I've been a part of writing, I guess, for 20 or 25 years in market structure, so it's fun to actually drive it.

    Hiten Patel

    You said something very interesting that you talked about the shift from service or vendor provider to partner. One of the things we've observed, particularly over the last 15 years post global financial crisis, is a little bit of that levelling up between the risk takers, all the risk managers, whether you're an asset manager or sell side trader and all those other providers that enable you selling the data, the technology providing the infrastructure. So share with me, how have you found that transition between the way that some of those providers are being viewed in the industry, some of the talent flows that have gone on over the last decade? You know, you've ridden that wave. Talk to me a little bit how you see that and how that's played out in your mind over the last decade or so?

    Brad Levy

    Yeah, I mean, 15 years ago you just did not see people going to vendors from banks or buy sides really in a meaningful way. Couple of guys I know, women like not a lot, ten years ago was not even a thing I'd say in the last few, maybe blockchain maybe brought that and crypto, there's been a lot more and granted a lot of people that hasn't worked out yet for them.

    But in the last ten years, I'd say the wave of people from street to somewhere has been more in that digital asset world, which has been interesting. You've had just a lot more movement across industry, you know, like I see a lot more former Goldman and JPMorgan people at other banks now. You just didn't see that a lot, whether you know, Bank of New York or Deutsche Bank

    But you saw them, they would either kind of go into the Hamptons ether like they would just disappear into the golf courses or they went to government or maybe they went to the buy side or started up a hedge fund. But the last few years, for sure, you've seen a lot of the street moving. There's been a lot of dislocations and change.

    That's people movement. You know, it drives people movement. But I think tech is now a front office thing. You know, operations is now much more important to the whole business. These are things that really were just not said ten years ago. I mean, a person that's a good example. Robin Vince, who's now the CEO of Bank of New York Mellon, he ran the money markets business.

    He then ran operations. He was very close with Bank of New York because Goldman and Bank of New York have a tight relationship for banking and repo and all of that. Eventually, he makes his way to Bank of New York and is now CEO. And there's a number of Goldman people that have joined there. So he went on this path of operations is important.

    He went from front office to back, which when he did that kind of did not happen. Like you had somebody that was running a front office business and went to run operations and it made him much more rounded and skilled, I think, and was a good partner for me back in the day. And yeah, I think there's just so much more movement now.

    And even to the Microsofts and the Googles and the AWS right. You've got people going there from the street in, you know, Phil Venables, Goldman Sachs CISO ( Chief Information Security Officer) for 30 years is now CISO for the Google Cloud, he's been there for a few years. Yeah there's so there's I love this because that's how we're going to cross-pollinate and get a lot of these things working more together because you sort of alluded to I'll finish on this We are partners because we know our clients, because we were our clients.

    Brad Levy

    We really understand markets and workflows and not everybody in all of our businesses. But there's a heavy dose of people that have been on the street. So stylistically or just knowledge wise, we're not just providing a service that they figure out how to use. We're trying to get their service to them by knowing how they could use it because we've done some of their jobs.

    Hiten Patel

    Yeah, again, something you struck a chord that tech is now a front office thing. I think that is a really interesting and powerful statement, right? There was a period a few years ago where I was just observing,  we were just observing as a firm a lot of the technology talent, leaving the banks and walking into some of these privately backed companies where they've gone.

    Brad Levy

    Or big tech firms getting good paydays and remote work galore.

    Hiten Patel

    Yeah, and be the star of the show, right?

    Brad Levy

    Yeah. Rather than being the service provider and being subservient, you're actually the star of the show. The revenue or the value creator. Suddenly they become the new center.

    So I think that might even be day. I'm going to give you a new one because I just thought of it like this is hot off the press. I'm going to hashtag it. And I think tech was the new front office 3 to 5 years ago and exploded into the pandemic. I think data is the new like the data conversation is everything.

    And if you're in ops, you need better data. If you're in front office, you've always had good data, but it's very partial, it's market data and it's what people give you versus the sea of unstructured data that's just waiting like your telephone calls transcribed into signals that you could produce just for your own self. It may be creepy for a corporate to say, I'm listening to you, but I'd love to know how many times I say AI in the last year on my phone calls.

    It's not a lot, but when I say it, it's probably a few moments and I'd like to even know and maybe even the tone of the conversation and the person on the other side has changed to a downer when I said AI because it's a flywheel buzzword that's pissing people off already.

    Hiten Patel

    Well, look, we’ll definitely take your hashtag and remember that one. I think that's definitely true, right? That the shift from tech to data is a focus. For me, one of the key bellwethers is conversations we have with the private equity world. And there was clearly a period for a couple of decades, but it was all software, software, software, software.

    You know, it was all about look at that as a core business model and build up upon that. You’re starting to see the pivot now where it is data, data, data, data.

    Brad Levy

    You know, it's a little like Salesforce as a great company with great products, but Salesforce with bad data and it is really, really painful. Again, I was born into a world where my software was installed hard on a machine only accessible to be upgraded by floppy, maybe a serial port plug in. And my data was a three and a quarter inch.

    You know, that was my data, my model, my data and my application. It was all a very localized thing. I think it's coming back to that. It's going to be super local with sensors and compute and data. Just your data in an AI machine, your data in your firm in an AI machine, your data in your industry in an AI machine, you should be building from the middle.

    I think that's Web 3.0, by the way, Web 3.0. I don't think it's 3D. I don't think it's immersion. It's not goggles. I think it's data security at a local level. So I don't have to give up my life to anybody to buy chewing gum or get a bank loan.

    Hiten Patel

    Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. I'm going to shift gears a touch now, Brad, and kind of step out a little bit from the professional world and reflects a little bit on the personal world. And what do you do outside of, you know, geeking out on markets structure, tech and data? Be great if you could reflect a little bit on what you do outside the professional sphere and how has that helped you or informed you in the day-to-day professional role?

    Brad Levy

    I'll be cliche again, but family first, I've got a great wife and two kids. Actually I'm out of, as of next month I will have no teenagers anymore, which is mind bending. I have a daughter who's graduating college, which is amazing. I think I spend too much time at work. I spend too much time traveling, I spend too much time looking at my phone when

    I should be eating dinner with them. But it is the thing that is just the most important and definitely I like my kids like we have fun. You know, that kind of goes into numbers two and three, which is somewhere between yoga and snowboarding. Like, I think it's the same thing where it's a bit of a meditation where I have to be present.

    Brad Levy

    Like if I'm riding on my board, I pretty much have to be there or I'm probably going to die. Yoga just kind of gets you there naturally by part of the process. So one is called active meditation for savage joy. One is just doing yoga. So yeah, I'd say for ten years on yoga and for 25 ish on the board, and it's the thing I found with my buddies who I ride with every year for 20 years on the, you know, on the snow or Markit was a heavy skiing snowboarding company, did a lot of good stuff at the mountain just having fun.

    And it's a community you want to be around like people that are fit, people that want to be on vacation and ride. There's like, I like to lay on the beach, by the way, that's probably a solid number three, and I like to be at the ocean and all of that. So yeah, I just think simple stuff. I really am not, you know, I travel too much.

    I'm interested in seeing the world, but, you know, my family, staying healthy and enjoying my job is just kind of what and probably in that order.

    Hiten Patel

    Awesome. The next time we have a meeting and I see your eyes glazing over, I know you're daydreaming about careering down some mountain out in Colorado.

    Brad Levy

    I did stop mountain biking. It was a little too dangerous. I was balancing my risk reward, mountain biking, snowboarding. But yeah, no, it's anyway, it's really, you know, you got to do these things. Work life balance has never been more important, and especially with the tech crush, which we're trying to be part of, but minimize the anxiety producing part of it.

    Hiten Patel

    And then just thinking forward to the next generation. Given you've mentioned the age of your children, I guess what career guidance are you giving them as they kind of go out entering the workforce.

    Brad Levy

    Go outside. Literally go outside like go outside and play, go to work, learn from watching people physically in an office, get dressed and commute. Not saying pound into the office 9 to 5 like Dolly Parton, you know, back in the day, dating myself with a movie. But you know, there's a purpose to connecting with people physically. You do different connections physically you learn more. I learned a lot by showing up to work at Lehman and Goldman in the nineties and, you know, at Markit. And you know leaders, you know, for the first ten years of your life, you learn a lot by apprenticeship. And I think the pandemic has kind of pushed people to think you just don't need to connect with people physically or show up or go outside.

    And again, it's not about pounding in to commute every day, but it's important to just be physical with people and get to know them on a three dimensional level where you can actually like exchange like, this is great. I love Zoom. It's efficient. I feel, you know, I know you well though you and I know each other on this call because we've had a thousand conversations already physically.

    So it's a different call because we can do two dimensional because we know 3D. And I think it's just really important to go outside and show up for work and be present. And it's more fun anyway.

    Hiten Patel

    Yeah. One thing that struck me, one of my colleagues was telling me that we've now got a couple of managers coming through in our business that may be Zoom native that haven't led or driven business meetings in person and it's like we need to kind of close this skill gap or reskill. So I yeah, I don't think we fully process kind of what's, what's going on, what it means.

    I think better we benefit from straddling the pre and post COVID era.

    Brad Levy

    And that’s why I like being this gen X I sort of was born into no tech and am now in heavy tech, but I'm still young enough to kind of figure it out like it's, you know, the digital natives are great, you need them, but they're definitely they don't understand the value of physical as much. And I think they could replicate, which someday you can and that's maybe a world we don't even live in, to be honest.

    Hiten Patel

    Yeah, Yeah. So look then as we've come to a close. One of the things we like to do on the show is just to throw the spotlight or we trying to raise awareness on pretty interesting and exciting things happening across the financial infrastructure and tech community. So I was going to ask you if you could throw the spotlight on an individual or a company that's impressing you the most right now that you think that listeners should be paying attention or looking up?

    Brad Levy

    I'm going to give you three fast. So Google and what they're doing Thomas Kurian and the cloud. And AI know that there's a whole kind of thing going on there, you know, with the mega techs. But, you know, I spend real time there. I think all companies will push people around to their benefit at times. But Thomas Kurian at Google, who's just released, you know, that was a big part of the splash last week.

    I think Lance Uggla from Beyond Net Zero. Who's my guy from Markit. And I've just grown up with him. He's running a climate fund now, which is awesome. $5 billion climate fund from GA that is called Beyond Net Zero. And then one other is Sheila Sarum at BASTA, who I met at Markit, but we work with her now.

    She runs a program for first generation grads that just don't even know what it means to be professional. It's kind of so they really groom them from a much younger age to just give them general skills that they don’t benefit from having, so where nobody in their family has graduated from college. So they, you know, I'm actually a first generation of my little family. And it's people of color and it's a New York City kind of thing. So she is doing really good work at BASTA, doing the hard work to try to create opportunities for people that don't even know what exists.

    Hiten Patel

    That's awesome. That's awesome, that’s great to call out. Well, look, you didn't disappoint Brad. Always enjoy our conversations. Thank you for taking us on a whirlwind tour of three and a half inch floppy disks to learning scripting all the way through to snowboarding down a mountain. So I appreciate you taking the time out of your day, sharing your thoughts with us, and look forward to catching up.

    Brad Levy

    Thanks for having me and see you in the future.

    Hiten Patel

    Cheers Brad.

    This episode was recorded in May 2023.

    Symphony CEO, Brad Levy, joins our host, Hiten Patel, to discuss the impact of technology on the financial industry, with a focus on data and artificial intelligence (AI). Brad shares his view that data is the new front office and that the industry is only starting to leverage its power. He discusses the potential of AI and its transformative effect on people's capacity to process and generate information, as well as the advantages of in-person work over remote work.

    Key talking points:

    • Reflecting on Brad’s career journey, including his time at Goldman Sachs and Markit, with a focus on the challenges he has encountered in his career and the importance of learning from mistakes.
    • The benefits of working for large firms versus startups, and how his past roles shape his and his colleagues’ approach. 
    • The value of partnerships and relationships in the industry. Brad advocates for individuals to venture outside, be physically present, and learn from observing others in the workplace. 
    • Three individuals and companies that impress Brad: Thomas Kurian at Google, Lance Uggla at Beyond Net Zero, and Sheila Sarum at BASTA.

    This episode is part of our Innovators' Exchange series. Tune in to hear the latest discussions around financial software and technology industry developments, data complexity, and implications of AI in financial industry.

    This episode was recorded in May 2023

    Subscribe for more on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google | Podscribe

    Hiten Patel

    Thank you, Brad, for joining us.

    Brad Levy

    Thank you so much for having me, Hiten. Really happy to be here.

    Hiten Patel

    Probably did do your intro just right there, Brad, you've got a pretty long history in the industry. Why don't you do a better job for me in picking out the highlights of the last 10, 20, I may say 30? But it might offend you. Let's say 20 years.

    Brad Levy

    No, 31 years. It's fine. I wear it. It's the wisdom. Yes. So 20 years on Wall Street. Most of it at Goldman Sachs, where I, from 2000 on was in e commerce and ran the Strategic Investments team where I was involved in a number of initiatives across the street, consortiums of all kinds, whether it’s FX, ICE, trade web, swaps clear, swaps wire, market, etc.

    I left in 2011-12 to join Markit, one of our portfolio companies. We had, I guess pre-IPO, but I joined that company to become an operator of market infrastructure, market structure. Obviously most know who Markit is, now part of S&P. We went public, we were merged with IHS in 16. I spent eight years there where I left toward the end of 19 and started up at Symphony in July 20 where I've been CEO since just about two years now in June.

    Hiten Patel

    Amazing. Amazing. What keeps you so young and hungry for this space still, after 30 years?

    Brad Levy

    Well, it's interesting. I mean, at a minimum,  I've tried to maybe be a little bit out on the edge, not like the bleeding edge of the future, but just trying to stay ahead a bit and I think just that act probably keeps you a bit more interested when you're sort of moving into the future versus, you know, maybe just trying to stay a bit more static.

    So I've always sort of been moving forward a bit. Tech has been part of my career really since I started as a banker in the nineties using Lotus, Excel, cc: Mail before the Internet, before cell phones, literally. So yeah, I just thought, you know, why not stay out there if it worked for my first ten years? And it probably keeps me a bit more interested in what I'm doing, tech is obviously a big impact in the world and finance is not alone.

    And in fact, it might be one of the bigger planet drivers, FinTech in the next decade or so, which is pretty cool.

    Hiten Patel

    Awesome. And tell me a little bit more about what drew you to Symphony. What drew you to that next challenge in your career?

    Brad Levy

    Well, I think product is interesting, running something that's a heavy product and not the easiest technology collaboration, running to the edge of people's Wi Fi and be performant, etc. But I'd been in this sort of identity chat space for now over 20 years where I was involved in an initiative, a company led communicator that was a technology platform that Markit acquired in 06.

    So I worked on a system called Hub IM back in 03, launched that, it didn't work. At Markit we shut that product down in 08. I built another product at Markit, Directory Service that ultimately sold to Symphony in 14. So I was always in the space of collaboration, chat and identity. I believe in security, data protection, etc. and I had the opportunity to join the company a couple of years ago, brought on by the founder CEO at that time, David Gourlay. So it's been a bit something I've been involved in the same amount of time I've been involved in maybe post-trade or clearing or data or just other streams of market structure, communications is a really interesting field. And, you know, we're bringing a lot together, including some data science assets, which we could talk about a bit.

    Hiten Patel

    Awesome, and just for the benefit of those listeners who are not familiar with Symphony, I know the company has evolved, how would you describe it in a moment or so around how you got people to think of Symphony?

    Brad Levy

    I'll try to use a few words. You know, a couple of years ago, I think we were really we were in collaboration very directly with a chat screen share file, file share stack, you know, comparable to maybe a Slack with Zoom or teams overall. But we've evolved quite a bit since then. We've acquired some companies, so now we are a platform for sure, not just an application on the desktop but a modern platform with quite a bit in the back end, extensible, etc. We are a communications platform, I would say now because collaboration has to be in the field of communication. But we also have a voice business Cloud 9 that we acquired in trader voice. So I think we're a platform that is led by communication and now we have some interesting assets that we're working with in identity.

    A company called StreetLinx, we acquired to build profiles that are more granular so you can sift and sort the data coming at you or put your intent out, and then a true NLP and machine learning platform amenity. That's a data science, you know, sentiment reader of earnings calls and ESG data, etc. So, you know, we're definitely a platform.

    We have about 20 products that we quote unquote sell. One of them is the core access to Symphony. Another one is Cloud nine Trader Voice. But we really try to operate as a seamless platform that it could all work together or could work in its pieces. So, we are 600,000 users on the system across about 1000 institutions global and cutting across the front, middle and back-office workflows and partnering our way through that in a meaningful way this year and last.

    Hiten Patel

    Great, sounds super exciting. And one of the things we struggle with as advisors to this space is it's often easy to point the trends in the direction of travel are easy to call and see. One of the things we really wrestle with is kind of trying to understand that pace of change, that pace of adoption.

    One of the things that's always been a challenge a little bit, particularly around traded markets, capital markets, is sometimes that resistance to change. Like how much are you seeing a willingness to kind of embrace some of those capabilities you describe? Is it slowing down? Is it accelerating? How are you navigating some of that?

    Brad Levy

    I think on the surface, humans create patterns and then don't like to break them, good or bad, right habits, addictions, whatever. So I think once you create a pattern, it's hard to get humans away from it. I think that's just a feature of planet with us on it. The pandemic was definitely an accelerant to technology push.

    I'd say in general, whether it's cloud mobility, where remote work platforms were distributed were encrypted end to end. So a lot of the things that were already in play five or ten years ago were definitely accelerated by the pandemic. I would say the co-mingling of different animal types now across the spectrum, whether it's players like us that are scale ups or true fintech startups or big market infrastructure players like exchanges or parts of big asset managers like Aladdin

    And then you get into Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Salesforce, like everybody's now in on the financial services game, capital markets included, as well as retail. And then you just have moments like November 30th 2022 where ChatGPT kind of just occurs to people that it exists. It's been in the works for many years. A.I. is not new, but just this consumerization.

    It's almost like when the BlackBerry went into retail and everybody got a full keyboard and then my mom could now text me because it went from that crazy way to text to an actual typing keyboard. Yeah, like that's when I knew that the firewall was broken. My mom now was in my tech stream where she wasn't before, and it just went mass market techs went mass market immediately when BlackBerry became an accessible device outside of corporate.

    Brad Levy

    And it's like there are these moments that builds and then boom. And I think we're not even like started yet on the speed of change driven by data. I think it's just the beginning of that for our industry. You know, we're big market data users, but we're not big data users when you really boil it down to the big data science.

    Hiten Patel

    And you always do a great job of exciting me, creating pictures and visions. Don't let me down here so ChatGPT like your view on that in a relatively closed industry right, relatively protected industry ,traded market traders etc. you see it having much change is it overblown, overhyped or is this something really, really, different about to happen?

    Brad Levy

    Oh, I think it's different this time, but impact will be dramatic and so similar to other times. But you know, I don't know. It could be printing press level type transformation for like humans, like ability of people to both consume and produce, which obviously, you know, printing press was version one, Internet was sort of version two, taking up a little bit of a leap there.

    But yeah, I think it's big and I think it's not that obviously there are systems that could be very public and widely distributed and consumer level and accessing everything that's in the indexed Internet, which is I think maybe 5% of what's really out there, 95% of the quote, “Internet” is below the glass, not searchable, you know, on the darknet or just closed systems, telecoms.

    So there'll be very private versions of these technologies that will only be accessible by you, companies that will do very well, I think, are companies that have a lot of data already where they just need to be served up the models and the compute, which I think Google, Microsoft, all these folks will do a good job at serving confidential compute environments for them.

    So you get the scale, you get the benefit, but you don't have to pile your data into a whole of, you know, public, you know, AI, natural, you know, large language models. So like if you think of Tesla's lead in self-driving, like they just have so much data where JP Morgan as a bank, these people have so much data to work with.

    Now they're going to be within the bounds of what they have rights to do, but that's still a lot of meta or connections or trends like Jamie Dimon and Elon Musk. You just listen to them because they have so much access to information. At a minimum, they may be dumb, but their data makes them wise. Not saying either of them are dumb, by the way, especially Jamie Dimon.

    He's a key partner for us. Like their data, but they're not going to just shift that, you know, throw that into Google. They're not going to allow their people to go into chat GPT native, we think we have a role of providing a safe, secure gateway that is trusted, that is on desktops and built for these workflows ultimately and bots and people and applications working together across modules.

    So maybe that's a little bit of a visual for you on a venning of confidential compute wrapper, your private data inside pulling in public data sets that makes sense at that moment, leveraging the tools and assets that you want either procured or built, or both. And that's going to be the bigger environment, the private environments, leveraging compute from mega techs and the models themselves, maybe in open source, I would argue.

    Hiten Patel

    It definitely feels pretty groundbreaking and revolutionary. I had one of my teams sent me a document the other day to review at any point to me afterwards that there was a page or two in there that they'd use chat GPT to produce. And I was a little bit like oh so you guys are messing around with this stuff.

    And I got the reply back. “Well, didn't you used to use Excel when you used to drive the modelling?” I was like, absolutely. And so this is, this is already been viewed as a call to kind of mess around and experiment with. So I suspect it's not just the financial services, professional services as a whole, I think.

    Brad Levy

    The whole services world, journalists, modelers like when I was first starting to use Lotus, I had to write macros and overlay the formatting program called Always to get bold and fonting. Then I got Excel and it gave me all of that. But I was still writing macros and then I was able to just record my actions, write a macro through Visual Basic, change range names, and I was like a hero in the mid-nineties, but I was just literally leveraging a tool that was embedded in the thing that you just had a dropdown, a few menus, and I've made a print macro that I was like hero of the analysts because you could just hit the button and it printed and got all your ranges right and your sizings of columns. Like that was a simple tool that changed my career actually in the nineties as a banker. I also got a Pentium computer, which my model went from 9 hours to one hour to run. The people that had 486s were literally nine times slower than me, like overnight. And I was in charge of doling out the 586s, which was pretty awesome as a first year associate.

    Hiten Patel

    Awesome, awesome. So let's just pivot a little bit, Brad. I guess we talked a little bit about the future and what's coming down the pipe. Let's just take a look backwards. I am keen on this show to make sure that people can learn and benefit from some of those who've been very successful in driving change and driving impacts.

    Hiten Patel

    And I'm aware that it's not all a bed of roses and not everything just falls at your feet no matter how it seems. Talk to me a little bit around some of the challenges that you've faced. What are some of the most interesting things you've had to overcome? And what do you think others would benefit from knowing a little bit more about.

    Brad Levy

    Well, it is definitely cliche, but you definitely learn more from your mistakes or when things go badly. Like I lived sort of through 87, I was old enough, you know, certainly and kind of changed the path, you know, where I was going to college a bit just based on the event. 94 was a very local event that the fixed income markets blew up and I had just gotten to Goldman. 98, there were big financial blow ups, 2001 the e-commerce bubble. 2008, I was pretty active in helping the credit derivatives market develop in the subprime indices and all of that. So, I personally have learned a lot from when things don't go as planned and you actually have to make a move left or right.

    Like I joined an e-commerce team at Goldman in June 2000, the e-commerce bubble burst big and it was a four letter word like derivatives after 98 and long term capital, I stayed with derivatives. I stayed with e-commerce. It probably turned out to be the right path. But those were a year or two of like, am I in a seat that even exists as an e-commerce person?

    Fortunately, I was on the fixed side versus equities. Equities really got pushed more around as the dot com bubble imploded and market making changed, where FICC just started its journey on things like trade web ice, FX all, broker tech and things that I was involved in then that were again electronic trading, which people didn't want to talk about in 02-03.

    So yeah, I think those moments where I've lost or something's not going according to plan, I've definitely learned more from those mistakes then, because you can then win and if you try to replicate the wins constantly, like the wins generally don't come from the same place for the same reason. So you want to replicate your wins. That's hard to do and you tend not to want to lose, learn from your losses, and both are directionally wrong.

    So I would definitely say dot com bubble burst, sort of financial crisis of 08, clearing, Dodd-Frank, all of that and just having to do things and then choosing some things around that. You know, when you have to compromise or make choices, it's probably healthy. No different than not having endless supplies of money through low interest rate policy, like it's just healthy to have limitations and be pushed.

    And those are the moments that have served me best. Having done it at Goldman and Markit, to be honest, in a lot of those environments, those are great firms with great teams and you know, definitely having that through those moments was huge.

    Hiten Patel

    So tell me a little bit about you. You are one of the few people out there that can draw upon experiences of sitting with the benefits of a giant brand or behemoth from the days at Goldman through to starting out again from scratch. What's it like, compare and contrast for me a little bit on either side of those fences?

    Like what's the benefit of being with a giant? What's the benefit from being on the outside and, and challenging?

    Yeah, well, the leap from going from Goldman to Markit was a change because at a minimum I had to become more vendor, service, selling oriented. And to be honest, just taking it like at Goldman, you can push a bit more just as a firm and a brand and a role in driving consortium when you sort of are one of those, right, and you're sort of on the receiving end, you just got to figure out how to shapeshift same people, same conversations. But I have to now play a different role. That was a year or two of adjustment, I'd say becoming a vendor, a provider, from sitting at Goldman. But at the same time, you know, I'd made transitions that were somewhat easy and logical.

    Where I went to a company I knew well, Markit was, I don't think your average vendor. We ran pretty hard and, you know, we tended to think of ourselves as not subservient maybe to the client as much as a partner. So, I think that was healthy. Lance Uggla, if you know him like he is just nobody that's going to take orders from many.

    But he's an amazing person who brings people around him. So that was a eight year transition out of Goldman. That worked pretty well. And it was a more than a thousand people at the firm. I ended it was 15,000 people at IHS. So that is a smallish firm, we ran small. Moving to Boulder, Colorado was a bigger challenge for me actually when I joined Markit personally than leaving Goldman.

    In hindsight, I didn't realize the shift of life from Jersey to Colorado was a much bigger deal to my family. That's a learning lesson, by the way. I kind of made a leap and it, you know, that was a harder one. I did get back to Jersey and now I'm at Symphony, which is again, I built an asset that was acquired by Symphony.

    I know the space. It's a consortium of a lot of the people I've worked with. My team, actually, the people that worked for me at Goldman are actually my board members now, right? So it's like, you know, it's a small world. Relationships are important, don't burn bridges. So yeah, it's been a logical journey in hindsight, almost every move I made seemed risky or didn't make as much sense as it did in hindsight, maybe, and it's a 600 person company now doing big things globally. And you know, we acquire cool companies and it's a playbook I've been a part of writing, I guess, for 20 or 25 years in market structure, so it's fun to actually drive it.

    Hiten Patel

    You said something very interesting that you talked about the shift from service or vendor provider to partner. One of the things we've observed, particularly over the last 15 years post global financial crisis, is a little bit of that levelling up between the risk takers, all the risk managers, whether you're an asset manager or sell side trader and all those other providers that enable you selling the data, the technology providing the infrastructure. So share with me, how have you found that transition between the way that some of those providers are being viewed in the industry, some of the talent flows that have gone on over the last decade? You know, you've ridden that wave. Talk to me a little bit how you see that and how that's played out in your mind over the last decade or so?

    Brad Levy

    Yeah, I mean, 15 years ago you just did not see people going to vendors from banks or buy sides really in a meaningful way. Couple of guys I know, women like not a lot, ten years ago was not even a thing I'd say in the last few, maybe blockchain maybe brought that and crypto, there's been a lot more and granted a lot of people that hasn't worked out yet for them.

    But in the last ten years, I'd say the wave of people from street to somewhere has been more in that digital asset world, which has been interesting. You've had just a lot more movement across industry, you know, like I see a lot more former Goldman and JPMorgan people at other banks now. You just didn't see that a lot, whether you know, Bank of New York or Deutsche Bank

    But you saw them, they would either kind of go into the Hamptons ether like they would just disappear into the golf courses or they went to government or maybe they went to the buy side or started up a hedge fund. But the last few years, for sure, you've seen a lot of the street moving. There's been a lot of dislocations and change.

    That's people movement. You know, it drives people movement. But I think tech is now a front office thing. You know, operations is now much more important to the whole business. These are things that really were just not said ten years ago. I mean, a person that's a good example. Robin Vince, who's now the CEO of Bank of New York Mellon, he ran the money markets business.

    He then ran operations. He was very close with Bank of New York because Goldman and Bank of New York have a tight relationship for banking and repo and all of that. Eventually, he makes his way to Bank of New York and is now CEO. And there's a number of Goldman people that have joined there. So he went on this path of operations is important.

    He went from front office to back, which when he did that kind of did not happen. Like you had somebody that was running a front office business and went to run operations and it made him much more rounded and skilled, I think, and was a good partner for me back in the day. And yeah, I think there's just so much more movement now.

    And even to the Microsofts and the Googles and the AWS right. You've got people going there from the street in, you know, Phil Venables, Goldman Sachs CISO ( Chief Information Security Officer) for 30 years is now CISO for the Google Cloud, he's been there for a few years. Yeah there's so there's I love this because that's how we're going to cross-pollinate and get a lot of these things working more together because you sort of alluded to I'll finish on this We are partners because we know our clients, because we were our clients.

    Brad Levy

    We really understand markets and workflows and not everybody in all of our businesses. But there's a heavy dose of people that have been on the street. So stylistically or just knowledge wise, we're not just providing a service that they figure out how to use. We're trying to get their service to them by knowing how they could use it because we've done some of their jobs.

    Hiten Patel

    Yeah, again, something you struck a chord that tech is now a front office thing. I think that is a really interesting and powerful statement, right? There was a period a few years ago where I was just observing,  we were just observing as a firm a lot of the technology talent, leaving the banks and walking into some of these privately backed companies where they've gone.

    Brad Levy

    Or big tech firms getting good paydays and remote work galore.

    Hiten Patel

    Yeah, and be the star of the show, right?

    Brad Levy

    Yeah. Rather than being the service provider and being subservient, you're actually the star of the show. The revenue or the value creator. Suddenly they become the new center.

    So I think that might even be day. I'm going to give you a new one because I just thought of it like this is hot off the press. I'm going to hashtag it. And I think tech was the new front office 3 to 5 years ago and exploded into the pandemic. I think data is the new like the data conversation is everything.

    And if you're in ops, you need better data. If you're in front office, you've always had good data, but it's very partial, it's market data and it's what people give you versus the sea of unstructured data that's just waiting like your telephone calls transcribed into signals that you could produce just for your own self. It may be creepy for a corporate to say, I'm listening to you, but I'd love to know how many times I say AI in the last year on my phone calls.

    It's not a lot, but when I say it, it's probably a few moments and I'd like to even know and maybe even the tone of the conversation and the person on the other side has changed to a downer when I said AI because it's a flywheel buzzword that's pissing people off already.

    Hiten Patel

    Well, look, we’ll definitely take your hashtag and remember that one. I think that's definitely true, right? That the shift from tech to data is a focus. For me, one of the key bellwethers is conversations we have with the private equity world. And there was clearly a period for a couple of decades, but it was all software, software, software, software.

    You know, it was all about look at that as a core business model and build up upon that. You’re starting to see the pivot now where it is data, data, data, data.

    Brad Levy

    You know, it's a little like Salesforce as a great company with great products, but Salesforce with bad data and it is really, really painful. Again, I was born into a world where my software was installed hard on a machine only accessible to be upgraded by floppy, maybe a serial port plug in. And my data was a three and a quarter inch.

    You know, that was my data, my model, my data and my application. It was all a very localized thing. I think it's coming back to that. It's going to be super local with sensors and compute and data. Just your data in an AI machine, your data in your firm in an AI machine, your data in your industry in an AI machine, you should be building from the middle.

    I think that's Web 3.0, by the way, Web 3.0. I don't think it's 3D. I don't think it's immersion. It's not goggles. I think it's data security at a local level. So I don't have to give up my life to anybody to buy chewing gum or get a bank loan.

    Hiten Patel

    Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. I'm going to shift gears a touch now, Brad, and kind of step out a little bit from the professional world and reflects a little bit on the personal world. And what do you do outside of, you know, geeking out on markets structure, tech and data? Be great if you could reflect a little bit on what you do outside the professional sphere and how has that helped you or informed you in the day-to-day professional role?

    Brad Levy

    I'll be cliche again, but family first, I've got a great wife and two kids. Actually I'm out of, as of next month I will have no teenagers anymore, which is mind bending. I have a daughter who's graduating college, which is amazing. I think I spend too much time at work. I spend too much time traveling, I spend too much time looking at my phone when

    I should be eating dinner with them. But it is the thing that is just the most important and definitely I like my kids like we have fun. You know, that kind of goes into numbers two and three, which is somewhere between yoga and snowboarding. Like, I think it's the same thing where it's a bit of a meditation where I have to be present.

    Brad Levy

    Like if I'm riding on my board, I pretty much have to be there or I'm probably going to die. Yoga just kind of gets you there naturally by part of the process. So one is called active meditation for savage joy. One is just doing yoga. So yeah, I'd say for ten years on yoga and for 25 ish on the board, and it's the thing I found with my buddies who I ride with every year for 20 years on the, you know, on the snow or Markit was a heavy skiing snowboarding company, did a lot of good stuff at the mountain just having fun.

    And it's a community you want to be around like people that are fit, people that want to be on vacation and ride. There's like, I like to lay on the beach, by the way, that's probably a solid number three, and I like to be at the ocean and all of that. So yeah, I just think simple stuff. I really am not, you know, I travel too much.

    I'm interested in seeing the world, but, you know, my family, staying healthy and enjoying my job is just kind of what and probably in that order.

    Hiten Patel

    Awesome. The next time we have a meeting and I see your eyes glazing over, I know you're daydreaming about careering down some mountain out in Colorado.

    Brad Levy

    I did stop mountain biking. It was a little too dangerous. I was balancing my risk reward, mountain biking, snowboarding. But yeah, no, it's anyway, it's really, you know, you got to do these things. Work life balance has never been more important, and especially with the tech crush, which we're trying to be part of, but minimize the anxiety producing part of it.

    Hiten Patel

    And then just thinking forward to the next generation. Given you've mentioned the age of your children, I guess what career guidance are you giving them as they kind of go out entering the workforce.

    Brad Levy

    Go outside. Literally go outside like go outside and play, go to work, learn from watching people physically in an office, get dressed and commute. Not saying pound into the office 9 to 5 like Dolly Parton, you know, back in the day, dating myself with a movie. But you know, there's a purpose to connecting with people physically. You do different connections physically you learn more. I learned a lot by showing up to work at Lehman and Goldman in the nineties and, you know, at Markit. And you know leaders, you know, for the first ten years of your life, you learn a lot by apprenticeship. And I think the pandemic has kind of pushed people to think you just don't need to connect with people physically or show up or go outside.

    And again, it's not about pounding in to commute every day, but it's important to just be physical with people and get to know them on a three dimensional level where you can actually like exchange like, this is great. I love Zoom. It's efficient. I feel, you know, I know you well though you and I know each other on this call because we've had a thousand conversations already physically.

    So it's a different call because we can do two dimensional because we know 3D. And I think it's just really important to go outside and show up for work and be present. And it's more fun anyway.

    Hiten Patel

    Yeah. One thing that struck me, one of my colleagues was telling me that we've now got a couple of managers coming through in our business that may be Zoom native that haven't led or driven business meetings in person and it's like we need to kind of close this skill gap or reskill. So I yeah, I don't think we fully process kind of what's, what's going on, what it means.

    I think better we benefit from straddling the pre and post COVID era.

    Brad Levy

    And that’s why I like being this gen X I sort of was born into no tech and am now in heavy tech, but I'm still young enough to kind of figure it out like it's, you know, the digital natives are great, you need them, but they're definitely they don't understand the value of physical as much. And I think they could replicate, which someday you can and that's maybe a world we don't even live in, to be honest.

    Hiten Patel

    Yeah, Yeah. So look then as we've come to a close. One of the things we like to do on the show is just to throw the spotlight or we trying to raise awareness on pretty interesting and exciting things happening across the financial infrastructure and tech community. So I was going to ask you if you could throw the spotlight on an individual or a company that's impressing you the most right now that you think that listeners should be paying attention or looking up?

    Brad Levy

    I'm going to give you three fast. So Google and what they're doing Thomas Kurian and the cloud. And AI know that there's a whole kind of thing going on there, you know, with the mega techs. But, you know, I spend real time there. I think all companies will push people around to their benefit at times. But Thomas Kurian at Google, who's just released, you know, that was a big part of the splash last week.

    I think Lance Uggla from Beyond Net Zero. Who's my guy from Markit. And I've just grown up with him. He's running a climate fund now, which is awesome. $5 billion climate fund from GA that is called Beyond Net Zero. And then one other is Sheila Sarum at BASTA, who I met at Markit, but we work with her now.

    She runs a program for first generation grads that just don't even know what it means to be professional. It's kind of so they really groom them from a much younger age to just give them general skills that they don’t benefit from having, so where nobody in their family has graduated from college. So they, you know, I'm actually a first generation of my little family. And it's people of color and it's a New York City kind of thing. So she is doing really good work at BASTA, doing the hard work to try to create opportunities for people that don't even know what exists.

    Hiten Patel

    That's awesome. That's awesome, that’s great to call out. Well, look, you didn't disappoint Brad. Always enjoy our conversations. Thank you for taking us on a whirlwind tour of three and a half inch floppy disks to learning scripting all the way through to snowboarding down a mountain. So I appreciate you taking the time out of your day, sharing your thoughts with us, and look forward to catching up.

    Brad Levy

    Thanks for having me and see you in the future.

    Hiten Patel

    Cheers Brad.

    This episode was recorded in May 2023.

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