Here's an early look at the messaging service Wall Street wants to displace Bloomberg

Symphony, the messaging service that is backed by more than a dozen Wall Street banks, launched on Tuesday September 15.

Business Insider's finance desk tried out some of the basic features of the system, and the messaging product itself immediately drew comparisons to another big name in the space: Slack.

That may be because at BI we are a Slack-newsroom. But that's not where the comparisons end.

Whereas the Bloomberg terminal - the multifaceted data provider that dominates Wall Street thanks to its secure chat tool - costs north of $20,000, Symphony costs a cool $15 bucks a month per user.

Symphony is also drawing some comparisons to other big names.

"The platform is really easy to use," says Greenwich Associates' head of market structure and technology research Kevin McPartland, who attended Symphony's unveiling in New York Tuesday. "Especially if you're a Twitter user it's super intuitive. But to get really interesting it needs a critical mass of users."

Al Silverstein, head of marketing and communications at Symphony, told Business Insider via the Symphony chat tool that different features will be rolled out over the coming months, and that some companies are already able to integrate their own content.

The company has said that it will integrate functions from a number of partners in the fourth quarter.

Symphony announced Tuesday that it had teamed up with startup Selerity,which monitors social media and online chatter for real-time data and trading cues; Dow Jones, which will publish thousands of articles on the platform; and McGraw-Hill Financial, which operates S&P Capital IQ and will integrate the data provider onto the Symphony platform.