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Oh Symphony was nothing like Slack. It was meant to be the Bloomberg IB killer[1]. You see, banks weren't happy paying 20k per user for chat. Turns out that the network effect is a thing and banks suck at building products, all Bloomberg had to do was sell Chat as a product and that was it [2].

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/16/symphony-a-messaging-app-b...

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/f16d73ee-a910-11e7-ab55-27219df83...

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I sold hosting to symphony in their earliest days. Before they disclosed who they were they said "money is no object" which is a common thing heard when quoting hosting. When I learned they were backed by GS I laughed...money literally was no object.

Point of symphony was the privacy focus. If you are a bank you could imagine the issue with have all your data in Slack or a Bloomberg chat DB.

I don't think that the security of Bloomberg and Slack are even comparable. The nature of chat in finance requires messages to be stored by a third party by definition since most of the communications occur in group chats and between banks/traders.

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