Goldman Sachs Group Inc (NYSE.GS) has claimed it has found the ideal pitch for a comprehensive communications technology for Wall Street. A plan was unveiled today that the company and 13 other partners hope to channel $66 million of investment towards Symphony Communication Services Holdings LLC. The 13 partners are comprised entirely of financial services companies that operate globally including asset managers and banks.

The CEO of Symphony is the experienced communications innovator David Gurle, the intention is to centralize the communications of financial companies, corporate buyers and individuals, meaning that their entire digital communication with each other exist on the same database.

One of the most significant factors in making this platform viable is that it is an open source, meaning that users can adapt code at the back end of the technology and make it suit their individual needs. This means they can create areas within the database for compartmentalized research, trading and internal data sections.

Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) has long acknowledged that messaging was one of the most complex and pressing issues to be solved from within the financial industry. The company’s principal strategic investments global co-head, Darren Cohen, claimed that messaging was the financial markets’ central nervous system, however there are many information towers that communicate with each other at all. He then went on comment that Goldman had been working for some time to find a single platform to link these silos and allow them to communicate better and effectively, then extend the platform to be inclusive of external users and clients.

The emergence of Symphony is a challenge to communications networks and incumbent data on Wall Street. A number of companies including Thomson Reuters Corp, Bloomberg LP, and Markit Ltd. all run their own internal messaging systems, with the latter pair having recently worked on a joint open source messaging platform. Goldman is already operating the Symphony system and has approximately 23,000 of its employees communicating through countless messages on a weekly basis via the platform

Bloomberg call their version Instant Bloomberg and it is used widely on Wall Street. This latest announcement by Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) is seen by many as an attempt by them to usurp the Bloomberg version. This is not the first salvo which has been fired between the two companies, Goldman were unsettled by reports last year that Bloomberg had obtained access to some of their clients metadata from their communications with the company, though sources from inside Goldman deny that this is the case. They claim that this is a long term vision that the company has held and its viability is reflected by the number and quality of investors who are on board.

Symphony will be available to large customers in return for a variable monthly fee. The size of this fee will depend on how much data storage and infrastructure is needed by the customer. It will be free to individuals who will also get the same protections available to corporations. The beta version is due in the first quarter of next year.

At 13:10 ET Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) is trading at 180.85 having opened at 183.57 it traded at a 1 yr high of 187.89 and a 1 yr low of 152.72. The dividend yield is 1.22%

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