With $66M in funding from a consortium of 15 banks, Goldman Sachs backed messaging and social networking service Symphony will launch by July
Goldman Sachs to debut new social networking service — Call it Goldman Apps. — A Goldman Sachs-backed messaging and social networking service …
Context & Ripple Effects
This launch announcement is the starting gun for Wall Street's most coordinated attempt to unbundle Bloomberg's terminal: fifteen banks, including Goldman Sachs itself, put up $66M so that Symphony could ship by July — making the customers also the owners. The pitch was secure messaging and social networking purpose-built for trading floors, where Bloomberg chat had been the default.
The subsequent coverage shows the bet compounding rather than fizzling: within months Symphony signed a Dow Jones deal to pipe news into the service as an explicit Bloomberg-terminal competitor, and by late 2016 it counted 14 of Wall Street's biggest banks as users while raising toward a $1B+ valuation. The consortium-funding model held through a $63M BNP Paribas–led round in 2017 and a $165M raise at a reported $1.4B valuation in 2019.
First-order effects
- Fifteen banks, led by Goldman Sachs, become simultaneously investors and first users of Symphony — their own chat traffic migrates onto infrastructure they part-own instead of renting from Bloomberg.
- Symphony enters the market with capital already committed, letting it price against Bloomberg's bundled terminal-plus-chat offering from day one.
Second-order effects
- The deletion and retention features that make Symphony attractive to traders draw regulatory attention almost immediately — New York's regulator questioned the service about data controls amid the rate-fixing investigations (coverage here), forcing compliance design choices on a tool marketed partly on discretion.
- Content providers gain leverage: the Dow Jones agreement establishes news licensing as a separate battleground, decoupling information feeds from the terminal bundle.
Third-order effects
- If bank-owned messaging holds, Wall Street's communications layer restructures around consortia rather than a single vendor — and the 2018 profile pointing to bots across institutions talking to each other and settling trades suggests the network's endgame is transaction execution, not just chat.
- A regulator willing to interrogate a pre-launch messaging platform sets a template for treating financial communication software as regulated market infrastructure.
The trend: Wall Street is rebuilding its communications stack as bank-consortium-owned infrastructure, converting Bloomberg's chat monopoly into a contested, eventually transaction-capable network.