Symphony founder and CEO David Gurle announced the launch of the secure messaging application in a blog post.
Gurle writes that the Symphony app has finally launched after work started on 30 September 2014, and will offer business users the opportunity “to protect their communications regardless of with whom they are interacting.”
New secure messaging app to challenge Bloomberg in financial sector
The app has been built to challenge Bloomberg’s domination of the financial messaging market, and is the product of a collaboration between major Wall Street banks including Goldman Sachs.
Gurle says that despite the launch of a vast number of new communications tools, none “adequately address the specific needs of business users.” He promises that Symphony will address issues such as security, cross-company collaboration and regulatory compliance.
Using a custom-built platform, Symphony will “protect your data using advanced encryption” and allow communication “one-on-one and in teams both internally and externally from a single application.”
Symphony – Partnerships announced with Dow Jones and others
The application will allow easy compliance with regulations which are especially important in industries such as finance and healthcare, and third-party developers will be encouraged to work with the Symphony platform by the release of the application framework APIs.
Partnerships have already been announced with Dow Jones, McGraw-Hill Financial and Selerity, and the application could prove a serious challenge to Bloomberg. Thomson Reuters is also expected to collaborate with Symphony.
Gurle details that Symphony will be available free of charge to individuals and small teams. For companies with a minimum of 50 staff the app will cost $15 per user per month, while an Enterprise version will be made available for larger teams.
Symphony is causing plenty of excitement, and Gurle says “it will fundamentally alter how you communicate.” Some investment banks have been trialing early versions of the app for around a year, but Symphony has now been released to the public.
It is thought that Goldman Sachs started planning the app following the Bloomberg spying scandal of 2013, when reports surfaced that Bloomberg journalists were able to monitor messages sent and received by staff at investment banks. Bloomberg may soon come to regret that incident.
