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 last March 15 as a product management director."
Brittan was previously global business manager for FX and economics at Bloomberg.
Fenics
A computer science graduate of Harvard, Brittan started his career in 1988 at Astrogamma as a programmer, rising to become the company’s chief executive in 1993. He was instrumental in the development of Fenics, which became the benchmark application for currency option pricing at the time.
| "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" |
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.