Dive Brief:

• Financial messaging app Symphony expects to have up to 150,000 users this year, surpassing its original estimate of 100,000 users, Symphony's CEO David Gurle told Reuters Friday. 
• The company launched in September 2015 and has 75,000 users to date, according to Gurle. Symphony aims to have 300,000 users by 2018. 
• Symphony is geared toward helping financial institutions reduce IT and compliance costs, Gurle said. Users in the platform can still access other popular messaging apps used in the financial markets, like AOL and Yahoo Messenger. 

Dive Insight:

Thus far, 18 of some of the world's largest financial institutions have spent around $170 million investing in Symphony. As companies continue to work to increase workplace flexibility and collaboration, messaging apps like Slack have taken off. 

Especially focused on compliance, Symphony is geared toward helping financial institutions monitor employees more closely—which has become increasingly important following a number of investment scandals—while also enabling them to streamline communications currently conducted by email, said Gurle.

Symphony competitors include Instant Bloomberg messaging and Thomson Reuters' Eikon Messenger, which have 327,000 and 250,000 users, respectively.  

"The product has reached a stable, what I would call a functional level," Gurle said in an interview with Reuters. "We are starting cross company communications. In June we will get into one-to-many, many-to-many and other forms of external communications."

Goldman Sachs says roughly half of its 38,000 workforce are currently using Symphony.