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Comment by JackFr | Hacker News Reader

The article misses two major points.

The social network is not nearly as valuable as the article makes out. It is only valuable insofar as the big banks are willing to trust you. If Societe Generale, UBS, Merus Capital, BNP Paribas, Bank of America, BlackRock, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, and JP Morgan all are a little skittish about Bloomberg controlling the platform, they can go somewhere else and tell the traders they have to use it.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/12/symphony-a-messaging-app-t...

The real killer app for Bloomberg is mortgage backed securities. It is data intensive, it is analytically complex and the second largest asset class, with 9 trillion outstanding, and you simply cannot trade them without a Bloomberg terminal.

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Symphony is an internal chat, just like Slack. It must provide more controls for very large corporations and store messages forever for financial regulations.

I've seen it rolled out in a large bank to every single employee overnight. The numbers given the article seems underestimated and are certainly misleading without context. It's an enterprise software onboarding 50k users at once, nothing like the usual valley startup.

I’ve not used Symphony for a year or so but it felt like the kind of thing my team could have built in a couple of months. I wouldn’t use it in the same sentence as Bloomberg, other than to say Bloomberg has nothing to worry about.

I think Symphony is terrible, and it does look like something one could code up in a weekend. But ...

Bloomberg News famously abused the trust of the banks:

https://www.vox.com/2015/7/24/11615004/backed-by-15-banks-st...

If the banks mandate that their traders use something else, they will. I don't think they're quite there yet, but Bloomberg is not all powerful.

Agreed, it's irrelevant with Bloomberg.

However it's a good story of making software in a very crowded domain and getting large enterprise customers right away nonetheless. Symphony is certainly is a catastrophe for Slack, a last minute competitor capturing all of the big financial firms.

> The real killer app for Bloomberg is mortgage backed securities

I guarantee you that 98% of the users paying loadsamoney for Bloomberg have never and will never trade or analyse MBSs.

I agree with you on the IM - it's one of the lock-in factors but would have been killed by Symphony if it were even close to the largest one.

Mortgage-backed securities seem like a bad bet right now. Unless you're betting against them, anyway.

There are no bad securities; only bad prices.

It appears the Fed will not let any asset class go under regardless of how many trillions they have to throw at it.

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