Goldman leads creation of new messaging service

The country's largest banks are rolling out a new service that could help them lessen their reliance on expensive data terminals like those sold by Bloomberg LP.

The service, called Symphony, announced on Wednesday that it would provide a way for employees throughout the financial industry to communicate with one another, as they do on Bloomberg terminals. Goldman Sachs spearheaded the creation of Symphony, but ended up gathering $66 million from 14 financial institutions that will jointly own the company.

Banks have been unhappy for some time about their reliance on Bloomberg's data terminals, each of which cost around $20,000 a year.

This unhappiness mounted in spring 2013, when it was revealed that reporters for Bloomberg News had been using data from the terminals to quietly gather information about bank employees.

A few months after that scandal, Goldman began talking with an existing messaging start-up called Perzo about jointly creating a more sophisticated messaging application. Perzo was merged with an existing Goldman application, Live Current, to create Symphony. Other banks may begin using the service sometime next year.

Bloomberg's chat service has long been one of the most indispensable parts of the data company's terminals because of the way the chat service connects the entire industry. The banks are hopeful that if Symphony succeeds, it may reduce the number of terminals they have to pay for.

Symphony is positioned to be more than just a messaging service. Programmers will be able to build new applications - for trading, for example - on top of Symphony because of the open-source nature of the company's software.

In addition to Goldman, the financial firms involved in the creation of Symphony are Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, BlackRock, Citadel, Citi, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Jefferies, JPMorgan Chase, Maverick, Morgan Stanley, Nomura and Wells Fargo.

©2014 The New York Times News Service