Symphony told Business Insider it had $35 million of recurring annual revenues at the end of 2017 and that rate is growing by 50% each year.A lot of the adoption has come from the banks and asset managers that invested in the product. Data partners offer "lite" services through Symphony in the hopes that customers end up subscribing to get richer feeds. This is a sticky feature for Bloomberg as it faces competition from Thomson Reuters' Eikon platform and chat-only startup alternative Symphony. When the news leaked, Goldman received a flurry of inbound calls from other banks keen to get involved, according to a source close to the deal.In the end, a consortium of 14 banks and financial firms bought Perzo, a Silicon Valley encrypted messaging startup. A former staffer said: "He works extremely hard and he expects the same kind of performance from people around him. "We hear our customers say that Symphony is now positioned well beyond a chat application, to become a full workflow collaboration platform.
Customers pay $20 per month per seat.
Support came not just in the form of cash but also pushes to get employees to use the system.
Users told Business Insider that not enough buy-side clients are on the platform to create a so-called "network effect." By clicking ‘Sign up’, you agree to receive marketing emails from Business Insider Around two-thirds of its estimated $9 billion in annual revenues comes from its terminals. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. The data feeds they provide through Symphony have not rolled over into paid-for subscriptions at the rate they hoped for. "Several traders at major banks BI spoke to said they have limited desktop space, and it's difficult for them to justify adding another platform such as Symphony.A trader at Credit Suisse said: "At some point, they'll compel us to use it. It charts the growing pains of a hotly backed startup that has rubbed up against a Goliath and lays out the challenges it still faces.Five years ago, Wall Street banks were privately furious after discovering that Bloomberg reporters could see limited information about what terminal users were doing.Bloomberg quickly closed this loophole but the incident spurred a coalition of banks, led by Goldman Sachs, to push forward on a long-held ambition to try and build an industry-owned challenger to Bloomberg's ubiquitous $24,000-a-year terminals. The Silicon Valley startup charges $180 a year per user, compared to $22,000 a year for a Bloomberg terminal subscription. BlackRock and AB, who together have almost $7 trillion in assets under management, are both major supporters on the platform. After a slight dip in terminal sales in 2016, Bloomberg sales rose by 0.6% in 2017 according to Burton-Taylor International.Jan warned in his note that partners may also be growing unhappy with the platform. But then so did [Spotify founder] Daniel Ek, so did [Apple founder] Steve Jobs. Symphony is solving a problem I don't have. "Those close to Symphony have downplayed the company's antagonistic relationship with Bloomberg.One of Symphony's original investors said: "Maybe Bloomberg touches 5% of [our] workforce. Disrupting any industry is generally a tough task but Silicon Valley has shown time and time again that it is possible.Investors stressed that if anyone can crack this Gordian knot, it is Gurle. "The history is that most companies that confront Bloomberg with a new product end up dead on the side of the road," Taylor said.Symphony's backers and executives stress that the company is just at the beginning of what is likely a very long journey. The bulk are still in financial services.Symphony is not the first to try and challenge the dominance of Bloomberg as the connecting tissue of Wall Street. "It was positive in the sense that, yes, it is getting rolled out and the product has support from multiple levels within the company but the people using the product a couple of years ago didn't like it that much and to be honest we didn't like it that much. But we're old dogs, and it is hard to learn new tricks. Symphony is a real challenge to Bloomberg It is the virtual equivalent of the old stock exchange, a gathering place for everyone in the business Share on Twitter (opens new window)
The big question is: can David Gurle make Symphony the exception?This story is based on conversations with over 35 people, spanning current and former Symphony employees, board members, investors, customers, analysts, and partners. 70% of our largest clients' top 150 trading partners are on Symphony (globally, based on communication frequency). It is still "early days" for open collaboration platforms and we are all learning together.