• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, March 9, 2015

There’s a new social network for the wolves of Wall Street called “Symphony,” created by Goldman Sachs, which has already soft launched the network and plans to officially unveil it in July, according to a report in the New York Post.

Symphony provides a new, secure social conduit for financial types, including chat forums to discuss all their clever ways of making money -- yes, there’s a forum about Bitcoin, and probably one for subprime mortgage-backed securities too. But it has a fun side as well: one chat forum is devoted to soccer. It also incorporates instant messaging, Twitter, and internal feeds for companies.

The social network was launched by Goldman with support from a consortium of 15 banks, which have together invested a whopping $66 million in Symphony, which operates as an independent company. The NYP reports that it’s partly intended as a way for banks to reduce their reliance on Bloomberg’s messaging and data terminals. It’s also a way for internal compliance officers to keep an eye on what traders are saying and quash any talk that could incriminate the company in court (everyone knows you have those conversations in neighboring bathroom stalls or over a few lines at Tonic, duh).

Symphony has already signed up over 19,000 users from Goldman Sachs, equal to about two-thirds of its workforce, per the NYP.

While enterprise social networks are nothing new, there seems to be a growing trend of dedicated social apps for different parts of corporate America. Last month, for example, Thomson Reuters introduced a new iPhone app version of the business information publisher’s BoardLink service, a secure, collaborative workflow app designed for corporate boards of directors.

The BoardLink iPhone app gives board members secure access to a variety of corporate and business intelligence information and allows them to stay in touch with fellow members, responding immediately to urgent items, as well as drafting documents with digital signatures. All documents are encrypted for both online and offline review.