Bloomberg has announced the expansion of its IB Connect solutions to transform the way financial professionals interact with their counterparties and collaborate with front-, middle-, and back-office colleagues. Bloomberg says IB Connect: Cross-Firm Chatbots (“bots”) is an add-on service that helps Bloomberg Anywhere users bring in-house, proprietary bots to IB chat rooms with multiple firms.
According to Bloomberg, clients can build their bots to automatically surface relevant information from their internal applications and share it in their IB communications with other firms. This includes status updates from order management systems, market reports from research content management platforms, and trade ideas from client relationship management tools. By bringing a bot into an IB chat room, colleagues and counterparties can get information by directing a question to the bot without having to leave their discussions.
The solution uses a two-way API enriched with Bloomberg’s NLP to provide structured data and context to IB chats directed to the bot, added the company. That technology is tuned for capital markets and understands finance lingo to help make communications more machine-readable. Whether a bot is posting a notification or responding to a user query, relevant information like order updates and market commentary can be delivered by the bot in neatly organized visuals called BCards. The bots can also post free text, tables, links and @mentions. IT teams can customize bots for their firm’s unique tech stacks, in line with Bloomberg’s API protocols.
Bloomberg says the bots complement its suite of IB Connect solutions designed for users to integrate their IB communications with in-house workflow tools, helping streamline collaboration with colleagues and counterparties. This new solution builds on IB Connect: Intra-Firm Chatbots as part of Bloomberg’s efforts to make it easier for the IB community to network across the buy- and sell-side and collaborate on multi-asset investment opportunities, the company continued.
Roger Birch, head of product: communication and collaboration systems for IB at Bloomberg, said: “Financial market professionals spend too much of their valuable time pivoting between applications and juggling hundreds of chat requests. By welcoming Cross-Firm Chatbots, we’re helping our clients build information hyperloops so they can focus on what truly matters in their chats with counterparties – delivering insights, building client relationships, and sharing the next big trade idea.”
Keep up-to-date with publishing news: sign up here for InPubWeekly, our free weekly e-newsletter.
