March 19, 2010
FX news: Google lays down challenge to Bloomberg with Brittan hire
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Silvia Antonioli and Trevor Carr
Google Finance has hired the former global head of FX for Bloomberg, Philip Brittan, to lead its attempt to break the stranglehold on financial information by Reuters and Bloomberg. Google wants to develop a more competitive financial data and analytics provision model, according to market participants.
A spokesperson for Google confirmed to Euromoney that “Philip Brittan started to work for Google Finance March 15 as a product management director.”
Brittan was previously global business manager for FX and economics at Bloomberg.
A computer science graduate of Harvard, Brittan started his career in 1988 at Astrogamma as a programmer, rising to become the company’s CEO in 1993. He was instrumental in the development of Fenics, which became the benchmark application for currency option pricing at the time.
After the sale of Astrogamma in 1995, Brittan set up a number of successful software development companies before joining Bloomberg in 2004. Since then Bloomberg’s FX functionality has developed rapidly and the company now truly competes with Reuters in FX news and analytics.
A source at Bloomberg speculates that Brittan will attempt to replicate Bloomberg’s functionality at Google across all assets, not just FX: “The fact that Brittan moved to Google makes me think that Google Finance will try to replicate the Bloomberg business model by providing financial data, analytics and other services, but Google will make the information available to the public for free. Professional traders may still prefer to use more sophisticated systems, but there is no doubt that Google has the potential to win some market share”.
Google’s existing finance offering is not one professional traders find useful, but if hiring Brittan signals a more serious attitude, it could shake up the ruling duopoly.
“Google finance, which offers free financial data, could in the long run become a serious threat to the major subscription-based financial information providers such as Reuters and Bloomberg. This is an attack on the subscription-based business model,” the source concludes.
FX comment: Google, too big to fail
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Bloomberg is a great offering but as an independent trader who paid the steep Bloomberg price tag for the past 10 years I let my subscription expire this year as I could no longer justify paying for a swiss army knife when all I was using was a couple blades. I, for one, am excited at the prospect of Google going after the Bloomberg/Reuters duopoly in quality financial information. Thanks for the article!
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Our scenario-based view of the future of on-line finance:
http://blog.valuecruncher.com/2009/09/a-future-of-on-line-finance-from-brokers-to-blogs-to-yahoo/
This move plays to our Super Commons scenario.
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Google has attempted to "enter" market after market, those "markets" being other peoples' businesses. If one examines their track record, one can see that Google has produced two things:
1. An ever-growing roster of failures in its attempts to enter others' businesses.
2. An ever-growing list of enemies.
Now Google does it again. But in the process, it also will make enemies out of all the financial services firms who also provide data as part of their services. The immediate impact of this folly will not hit Google's bottom line, as the immediate impact is a swelling supply of ill-will towards Google.
How will that "supply" of ill-will towards Google ever be manifest in the free market economy?
Certainly when firms angry at Google are offered (i) viable alternatives to Google (not easy in the short term given their share in search, but easy to do by swapping in alternatives to Adsense/Google Context Ads), (ii) opportunities to help those who wish to beat Google in search (this is much easier for large industry players to implement in the short run, and many are clearly formulating their dump-Google strategies right now), and (iii) setting up their corporate PC and IT strategies so as to cut Google out -- off the corporate desktop for search, off the IT agenda for MS Office alternatives, off the corporate agenda for cell phones and PDAs.
Financial services firms (who are also very real players in "financial information"), are very large employers and have very large share of the most valuable web traffic. In aggregate, they are a formidable enemy.
Financial information and news publishing firms, have another angle: stop providing Google with access to their news in any shape or form, AND, never give them access to their proprietary data such as FX and bond prices.
Google has an arrogance problem. They seem to be willing to forgive themselves for their failures in simple extensions to their core advertising business: they failed in radio. They failed in print advertising. Google TV ads seems a failure too. So they fail in markets which they should understand. Will they succeed in markets they don't understand? Oh, so hiring one Bloomberg insider is the trick eh?
Let's all kick back and watch this Google blooper play out. Should be entertaining.
Maybe next they'll become a bank and an electric power company and a video conferencing company (oops, they failed at that already).
Yes, let them keep flaring shareholder money. It's fun to watch!