By Patrick Graham
LONDON, March 24 (Reuters) - Blackrock (NYSE:BLK) said on Thursday it
was testing new financial messaging app Symphony, the first big
global asset manager to confirm it is moving ahead with the
system designed to address concerns over security and costs of
monitoring staff online.
Blackrock is one of 18 large financial institutions who have
invested around $170 million in Symphony, touted as a competitor
to existing messenger systems run by Bloomberg and Thomson
Reuters TRI.TO .
"I can confirm that we are piloting the service with a
sub-set of our workforce, and are looking to roll it out more
widely in the coming months," a spokesman for Blackrock said.
Symphony Chief Executive David Gurle told Reuters last week
that the messaging app expects to as much as double its current
75,000 users to between 130,000-150,000 by the end of this year.
He said he was aiming for 300,000 by 2018.
Existing messaging systems, Instant Bloomberg messaging and
Thomson Reuters' TRI.TO Eikon Messenger, have 327,000 and
270,000 users respectively.
Blackrock has a total workforce worldwide of some 13,000,
making it one of banks' biggest clients in trading in bonds,
currencies and other assets.
Getting a foot in the door with money managers can be
crucial in driving takeup of messaging apps, senior industry
figures said.
"The challenge is you have to get everyone to boot it up
every day. And you need a compelling reason to do that, so
Symphony has its work cut out," said Morgan Downey, chief
executive of financial terminal business Money.Net and a former
global head of commodities at Bloomberg.
"Most customers are on the sell side. But people who drive
that flow are the buyside. When one customer gets on a messaging
system, 10 people on the sell side will get on that system."
Symphony, which counts 60 banks and other financial
institutions as paying clients, expects to have recurring
revenues of about $18 million by the end of this year as
customer trials give way to communication between institutions.
While a number of banks have told Reuters that Symphony has
overcome internal barriers of regulatory compliance and cost,
usage for now is confined to relatively small test groups.
U.S. bank Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) GS.N , which began the project, has
said that roughly half of its 38,000-strong workforce was on the
system. Others have said there were plans for several thousand
per institution to be given access in pilot schemes this year.
(Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)