Thomson Reuters is extending the reach of its messaging tool to 1,300 buyside institutions in the foreign exchange market in its latest attempt to break Bloomberg's grip on communications within the financial community.
Eikon Messenger, which does not require a subscription to the group's Eikon data terminals, is used by 190,000 individuals. The volume of messages has doubled in the past year to more than 10m messages a day, said David Craig, president of the group's Financial and Risk division.
Eikon Messenger's rollout to interdealer brokers, prime brokers, corporate treasurers and others using its FXAll foreign exchange trading platform, to be announced on Monday, would help clients "reduce their reliance on one network", Mr Craig said.
"They have got one dominant provider and they want to have multiple providers in a more open market," he added.
The move follows Bloomberg's announcement in May of a chat-based platform for trade negotiation, execution and processing in the foreign exchange market. The product, IB Dealing, is based on Instant Bloomberg, which carries more than 200m emails and about 20m chats a day between users of Bloomberg's terminals.
It comes as Thomson Reuters and its smaller competitor, Markit, have been working with financial institutions including Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank to develop a rival messaging service. Known as Open Federated Chat, this would integrate with the companies' internal communications systems, regardless of which desktop they use.
Mr Craig declined to comment on the details of the initiative, but said: "Customers have asked us to work together as an industry . . . There's a lot of encouragement for us to work together."
The partnership was working on open standards for sharing directories and had to address security, privacy and compliance concerns to satisfy banks, individual users and regulators, he said, but he was "pretty confident" that the new chat service could launch in 2014.
Reuters launched a messaging service a decade ago, before its 2007 takeover by the owner of Thomson Financial, but has struggled to dent Bloomberg's position in the market. Banks' disquiet about news earlier this year that Bloomberg reporters monitored customers' terminal use has encouraged rivals to think that they can challenge its dominance.
Mr Craig, who said Thomson Reuters had "clear boundaries between editorial and the business", said chat groups such as a global sports forum had been successful in driving engagement with Eikon Messenger.
Eikon's launch three years ago disappointed investors, but the messaging push comes after second-quarter earnings showed that Thomson Reuters now has 61,000 Eikon subscribers, up 30 per cent in three months even as a weak European banking sector weighed on the financial and risk division's revenues.
"Our competitive position has never been better," Jim Smith, chief executive, told the Financial Times last week. "We have the strongest new product pipeline we've had in years."
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