A stock broker reading the market trend at the Bloomberg terminal in this photo. The rise of the Symphony system has been portrayed as a threat to the Bloomberg terminal's dominance in trading rooms.
New York: Having won over Wall Street and Silicon Valley with a low-cost messaging platform that aims to remake the way traders communicate, Symphony creator David Gurle has set his sights on new industries.
Barely three years old, Symphony quickly caught on in the world of high finance and now counts Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Credit Suisse, Societe Generale and Google among its investors.
BNP Paribas recently joined in, helping bring Symphony's estimated value to nearly $1bn.
Created in 2012 and officially launched two years later in Palo Alto, California, the system allows users to send private messages, confidentially exchange research and trading strategies and place orders -- all in real time.
Some have even portrayed the technology as a threat to the Bloomberg terminal's dominance in trading rooms, although others say that is premature.
"I'd been dreaming about this tool since my childhood," Gurle, 50, said in a video interview conducted over Symphony.
He says he further developed the idea after working for France Telecom, Microsoft and Skype, and chose to "disrupt" the financial world because it could open doors to other enticing industries.
"If for example a banker is advising Airbus in a bond issue to finance its next investment, they will work with legal, government and auditing services," with each communicating on the same platform, Gurle said.
He said he hopes to diversify Symphony beginning in 2018, moving into sectors such as insurance, health, defense and aviation, building a secured network for businesses.
A son of French and British diplomats, Gurle began his career in France but in January settled in Singapore to expand Symphony in Asia.
While Symphony is not really a head-to-head competitor with Bloomberg it is gaining ground on the dominant player on Wall Street. Bloomberg, which has existed since 1983, offers a vast panoply of services, including research, analysis, trading, data and news, in addition to messaging, at an average annual cost of $22,000 per terminal. While Bloomberg is a closed ecosystem, Symphony by contrast integrates outside services -- and with annual subscriptions at just $180. This flexibility allowed it to rack up 200,000 users in barely two years, and it is on track to reach 300,000 by the end of this year. There are 325,000 Bloomberg terminal users.
But Spencer Mindlin of the business research firm Aite Group notes that "Bloomberg has been the incumbent for a very, very long time."
