Barclays Expands Bot Framework

Within a year of deploying the Symphony collaboration and automation platform across its markets and banking groups, Barclays found that it needed to implement a bot framework so it could manage the growing demands that users were putting on the platform, according to a story in MarketsMedia. The bank started its Symphony implementation by deploying three bots into production, according to Mehru Anand, director of digital transformation client-facing technology at Barclays. “There was a research bot that is used by front-office research and sales, a CRM flight-check bot that is used by sales and the front office, and a central template bot that is useful for everyone,” she said. Barclays has since added another seven bots to its stable of bots. One is the bank’s echo bot that communicates market information between Symphony chat rooms while respecting the necessary information barriers between business groups. What used to take three days to process and develop due to the back-and-forth between organizations regarding procedures and configurations now takes Barclays less than a minute, according to Anand. The developers can use the language of their choice, such as Java or Python when writing their business logic, she added. “We see a lot of front office users wanting to use Python.”