Symphony adds Infront’s 12,000 users, rivals Bloomberg and Eikon

Infront and Symphony have announced the integration of the terminal with the platform, which will allow buy and sell-side professionals to communicate securely across financial markets directly from the Infront Terminal, while getting the pros of each software: compliant messaging from Symphony and flexibility, speed and mobility from Infront.

Instant collaboration for users is made possible through drag and drop content into chat channels, enabling the recipient to continue to work with the content sent over Symphony.

Martin Holtet, Head of Product Management at Infront said: “Symphony fits perfectly into Infront’s best of breed approach. By integrating with a secure, independent chat, tailor-made for the finance community, we give our 12000 end users the best possibilities to collaborate with their clients and brokers”.

From Symphony’s side, Frederic Stemmelin, Vice President, Business Development said: “Symphony’s ability to provide a secure and compliant communications platform means partners like Infront can deliver enhanced functionality to their users, ultimately providing the financial services marketplace more complete enterprise tools. In today’s highly regulated environment, it’s important to have one workflow application which users can trust to enhance productivity.”

The Infront terminal provides data of over 65,000 companies from 55 exchanges by 12,000 users in 27 countries, combining real-time global market data, news analytics and electronic trading. The firm markets especially to European trading companies that use premium terminals.

The companies are planning to go further in integrating the Infront Terminal with Symphony, which would include limited free data and analytics on a given instrument within the Symphony platform.

In late February, Symphony’s compliant messaging was integrated into FlexTrade’s blotter, allowing both portfolio managers and brokers to exchange content directly from their trading terminal. The integration remains ongoing as the expansion includes search and research on a given instrument, fixed income data, and capture chat in FlexTrade’s Transaction Cost Analysis tool (FlexTCA) so that everything can be recorded for regulatory compliance.

Symphony, part of Goldman Sachs’ in-house messaging product since 2014, expects to grow its business up to 150,000 financial users in 2016 as banks and asset managers sign up, and up to 300,000 by 2018. Leaders in the segment are Instant Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters’ Eikon Messenger, with 327,000 and 270,000 users respectively.

The firm’s messaging and workflow software uses a cloud-based/Software-as-as-Service (SaaS) subscription and can also use cloud-hosting technologies or stand alone. In late March, the company announced BlackRock was testing its new messaging app, beta version since April 2015, offered to bigger names at $30 per user per month and at a cheaper price for smaller firms.

With 170 employees, Symphony has attracted investment from big names such as the BoA, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and JP Morgan, among other 13, in a total of 170 million investment.