| By Renee Caruthers | 
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The battle to develop a competitor to Bloomberg's instant messaging service continues to gain steam with progress moving forward from two competing systems.
that Goldman Sachs will make a $6 million investment in technology company Perzo as soon as next month. Goldman Sachs is reportedly planning to create a new industry messaging service by blending Perzo into Goldman's own in-house messaging service known as Live Current, according to the Financial Times
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An alternative to Bloomberg would likely save cost, as Bloomberg terminals cost $20,000 each, but the New York Post reports that Goldman's main driver for finding a Bloomberg alternative was last year's scandal in which it was revealed that Bloomberg reporters were snooping through messages for ideas for news stories, and the realization that Bloomberg has the ability to "scrape" data from chats and messages.
Bloomberg apologized for the snooping incident, but it highlighted a data security risk that left Goldman uncomfortable, according to the New York Post. By contrast, Perzo, which the firm is reportedly planning to use in its service, is described by the New York Post as having "military-grade" encryption.
Meanwhile, executives from a second contender, Wickr, in interviews with the Financial Timesthis week, touted their messaging service's encrypted peer-to-peer communications and noted that the encryption ensures that Wickr never has access to the content of messages. Wickr is in talks with Markit about developing a financial industry messaging service and has reportedly spoken to Wall Street firms as well, though it wouldn't reveal which ones.
Wickr aims to be the "cheapest and the best" chief executive Nico Sell told the Financial Times. The company has hired Charles Schwab's former chief information security officer Andrew Caspersen to head the messaging company's financial services unit.
Wickr's messages can self-destruct, similar to Snapchat, but for the financial services industry, banks could set the messages to be stored for the mandatory seven years required by regulators before they disappear.
"The next wave of significant data breaches could be with archives of messages," Caspersen said in explaining one benefit of the self-destruct feature. He also said Wicker could create closed groups better than Bloomberg.
For more: - read the New York Post article - read the Financial Times article Related Article: Goldman-led consortium seeks to buy messaging startup
Read more about: Bloomberg
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