Bloomberg welcomes Intra-Firm Chatbots to IB

Bloomberg has announced a new Instant Bloomberg (IB) add-on service that supports clients’ digital transformation initiatives. The IB Connect: Intra-Firm Chatbots offering enables Bloomberg Terminal users to add proprietary chatbots to IB chat rooms in which all users are members of the same firm. Clients may invoke Intra-Firm Chatbots to automatically surface important information from their internal systems in IB to be shared with colleagues and facilitate in-house business intelligence discoverability.

IB Connect is a set of services that enable Bloomberg Terminal users to integrate IB with their firms’ in-house workflow tools, helping streamline collaboration with colleagues.

IB Connect: Intra-Firm Chatbots is a new IB Connect service that offers two-way integration between a client’s applicable IB chat rooms and their internal systems. It uses natural language processing to bring structure and context to a client’s unstructured IB data and makes that enriched information available to the client’s Intra-Firm Chatbots. Each client may use the provided software development kit to build and customize their IB Connect: Intra-Firm Chatbots for their firm’s unique tech stack and internal user workflow, in line with Bloomberg’s API protocols, added the company.

Pieter van Gaal, head of FM strategic engineering at ING, said: “ING’s Financial Markets Front Office Strategic Engineering team is constantly working on ways to improve customer experience. People have come to expect instant access and we don’t think their experience of financial markets should be any different. We’ve been working for some time now with chatbots and we’ve found the addition of Intra-Firm Chatbots in Instant Bloomberg to be a natural fit for what we’re looking to do.”

Philip Raciti, head of performing credit and a portfolio manager at Bardin Hill Investment Partners, said: “Before Bloomberg welcomed Intra-Firm Chatbots, we had been searching for a way to access data from varying sources in a structure that could be utilized for deep analytics with the ability to expand functionality over time. We recognize Intra-Firm Chatbots as an important step to bridging the data gap as it provides a simple and high value-add tool that facilitates real-time data connectivity between Bloomberg and our internal systems. Bardin Hill’s implementation of Intra-Firm Chatbots helps us directly access our largest information silo while driving process efficiencies.”

Roger Birch, head of product: communication and collaboration systems for IB at Bloomberg, said: “We continue to invest in innovations that enable our customers to further their digital transformation strategy and extract incremental value out of using IB. The IB Connect set of services – including Intra-Firm Chatbots – will help our clients create information hyperloops and gain fundamental efficiencies in their collaboration workflows.”

Bloomberg says it currently supports two types of client chatbot capabilities via IB Connect: Q&A Intra-Firm Chatbots and Notification Intra-Firm Chatbots.

Q&A Intra-Firm Chatbots fetch actionable intelligence with two-way communication between IB Connect and the client’s systems to answer chat queries directed to the Intra-Firm Chatbot. Users may inquire about a wide variety of data from their proprietary systems and these chatbots may then produce content (links, tables, visually enriched data) directly into the chatroom. These simple interactions with Q&A Intrafirm Chatbots help users and their teammates efficiently deliver information and add more value to their communication.

Notification Intra-Firm Chatbots deliver timely, proactive alerts and meaningful business intelligence without diverting attention from ongoing team communication when key events occur or when specific market conditions are met. This enables users to receive critical updates within the IB environment where they’re already collaborating. For example, notifications could be sent with analytics, inventory or order status updates for pre-trade, at-execution and post-trade workflows.