Tom Glocer joins chorus making leap to Symphony

Tom Glocer (photo), former chief executive of Thomson Reuters, is joining a US financial communications program seen as a viable alternative to Bloomberg’s $24,000-a-year terminal.

Glocer, a managing partner of Angelic Ventures, is joining the board of directors of Symphony, which provides encrypted chat services.

It received a $66 million investment last year from 15 financial companies including Goldman Sachs and BlackRock, according to The New York Post.

Symphony does not store any communications as a third party, and allows a bank’s compliance officers to stop chats from leaving the company - an increasingly important factor for banks who are seeing chat records in court papers, the Post reported.

Glocer is the latest of several former Thomson Reuters executives to join Symphony.

David Gurle, Symphony’s founder and CEO, was global head of collaborative services at Thomson Reuters, and worked on the company’s chat tool, according to the company’s website.

In addition to Gurle, there’s Eran Barak, Symphony’s global head of business operations, and Koray Oztekin and Ann Demirtjis, who do product management. At least four other Symphony employees in business development have formerly worked at Thomson Reuters, according to LinkedIn.

Symphony is already in wide use at Goldman Sachs, which led the round of funding last year. The service is expected to be broadly rolled out to Wall Street by July. ■