Media companies are banding together with Wall Street to take on Bloomberg
Dow Jones & Co., the news and data company, has joined the companies in collaborating on a platform that will rival Bloomberg's ubiquitous terminal.
The platform is being developed by Symphony Communications, which set out to operate an encrypted chat network for financial firms including hedge funds and big banks.
It will formally launch this week.
Symphony is backed by many of Wall Street's biggest banks, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo.
It was developed in late 2014 after a group of investors led by Goldman bought out the chat tool Perzo and rebranded it.
Dow Jones - publisher of The Wall Street Journal - has signed a deal with Symphony to distribute its news through the messaging platform, according to the Financial Times. Business Insider earlier reported in July that Dow Jones was collaborating with Symphony.
"The Wall Street firms using Symphony are highly valued customers," a spokesman for Dow Jones told Business Insider in July. "We want to make sure our market-leading financial news and information is available to them on the systems of their choosing.''
A spokeswoman for Symphony said at the time: "We welcome the opportunity of content and technology providers to be members of the Symphony Foundation to further enhance our communications platform."
The Symphony Foundation is a group whose members can develop and share modifications to the platform using its open-source code. Its companies include BlackRock, Markit, and McGraw Hill Financial/S&P Capital IQ.
Dow Jones isn't the only news provider working with Symphony.
Thomson Reuters said in July that it was "committed to securely connecting the broader community across financial markets."
"We look to work with any partners who share this goal and connect their end users with our Eikon Messenger network," it added.
The news that Dow Jones is collaborating with Symphony means the platform could serve as a distribution channel for one of Bloomberg's biggest rivals in the financial-news space.
Bloomberg's rivals see Symphony as an opportunity to get their products out to a wider group of people, Alex Tabb, a partner and COO at the research and advisory firm Tabb Group, told Business Insider in July.
"People want competition," he said. "People are tired of having their choices to them dictated by a single provider.
"If you have a product, and at the moment you only have one mechanism to get that product out, which is the Bloomberg terminal, it makes sense that you would want to support an alternative," Tabb added.