Bloomberg has long been essential among financial service professionals as the key communication tool in the industry.
With large institutions like the Bank of America, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs using it, over 200 million Bloomberg emails are sent daily.
Financial institutions are under continuous surveillance. Many laws govern the information flow, which requires strict precautions on your part.
We recently rolled out a major Jatheon Cloud software update, adding the ability to capture and archive Bloomberg email and Bloomberg chat, alongside a few smaller feature updates.
In this guide, we’ll cover:
- Why Bloomberg archiving is important
- Bloomberg archiving software requirements
- How Jatheon archives your Bloomberg chat and email
Why Bloomberg Archiving Is Important for Compliance
In the complex financial landscape, regulatory compliance is non-negotiable. Rigorous data protection laws and industry-specific regulations require every financial institution to archive their data for a certain period.
The most important regulatory body is The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) which regulates the operations and enforces rules that govern the activities of organizations operating in the financial services industry.
FINRA, specifically Rule 4511 and 3110 affects Bloomberg users in three distinct ways:
- Recordkeeping and Compliance — Under FINRA, Bloomberg messaging is considered business records and is required to be recorded and archived. This means that all Bloomberg interactions need to be accounted for and held for a minimum of 6 years.
- Monitoring — FINRA requires you to implement robust supervisory and monitoring systems to ensure that you work under industry rules and standards. This includes the Bloomberg chat which should be monitored for potential violations.
- Regulatory Reporting — Institutions under FINRA are obligated to report certain information about their organizations when requested. This involves Bloomberg users who trade or utilize other activities on the platform.
Because of these, Bloomberg compliance has become even more significant, especially in recent years when Bloomberg experienced a boom in its user base, with Bloomberg chat reports having more than 315,000 traders and investors worldwide.
With the seriousness of FINRA compliance, there’s a huge need for Bloomberg archiving solutions, but what should your Bloomberg archive be able to do?
Bloomberg Archiving Software Requirements
When choosing an ideal Bloomberg archiving solution for your business, you need to pay attention to its features.
These features need to be FINRA and SEC-compliant by allowing you to archive all Bloomberg messages. They should also make your overall data management easier.
Your Bloomberg archiving solution should have the following features:
- Capture of unique Bloomberg fields — Bloomberg chat metadata includes many less typical fields like chat entrance and exit logs and the number of chat participants. This data needs to be captured for it to be valid to any regulatory body.
- Protection of sensitive data — Both Bloomberg email and chat contain sensitive information like pricing, transaction, and trading data. Data protection features like multi-factor authentication, encryption, and geofencing ensure your cloud data is safe.
- Advanced deduplication – Legal teams’ main trouble when inspecting Bloomberg data for legal matters is the number of data duplicates, which makes it difficult to isolate important information and increases the time needed for review and analysis. Your archiving solution should be able to locate already existing data and delete it.
- Attachment capture — Most information transferred through Bloomberg is present in attachments, which many solutions don’t capture. Your solution needs to make attachment data retainable, indexable, and searchable.
- Advanced search — Just archiving Bloomberg chat and email data isn’t enough, as you usually need to retrieve it. This means going through thousands of messages. Modern Bloomberg archiving solutions allow you to easily find data with features like keyword list search, proximity and fuzzy matches, and Boolean search features.
- Custom retention policies — Since you need to adhere to different retention laws, many of them could require different retention periods.Setting this can be done manually, but it isn’t sustainable to know when you should delete or retain something. Automated retention policies detect data, place it under predetermined policies, and delete it when the retention period passes. They also allow for legal hold for data implicated in a legal case.
These are only the must-have features of a proper Bloomberg archive that will help you stay compliant with FINRA and other data retention laws.
Retain, search, and produce Bloomberg communication records.
Next-level cloud data archiving is here.
Jatheon’s Bloomberg Archiving Solution
Now that you understand all the features needed for your Bloomberg archive, let’s take a look at how archiving is done in Jatheon.
Jatheon integrates seamlessly into your Bloomberg Terminal and captures both Bloomberg chat and email exchanges between users inside and outside your domain and address.
If you’re using other communications channels like email, social media, or text messages, Jatheon will store all of these channels together with Bloomberg messages in one central repository.
Why is this so crucial?
Because of Jatheon’s search capabilities.
Users can search through Bloomberg messages only or through all communications data in your organization, giving you a much wider range of search.
With search options like:
- Boolean search — Combine keywords with AND, OR, and NOT operators.
- Wildcard and proximity operators — Search the archive with partial terms.
- Fuzzy searches — Accommodate your search for spelling errors.
- Keyword search — Look for specific terms with a dataset.
Jatheon will help you easily find what you’re searching for.
To make all of this possible, your Bloomberg chat and email are captured and indexed at the instant the messages are sent or received. They are then stored in a tamper-proof format for granular searching in line with all FINRA and SEC mandates necessary for full Bloomberg compliance.
This means that when needed, this data can be searched for and retrieved in a matter of seconds. Thanks to Jatheon’s message integrity check, you can also prove that the messages haven’t been edited or manipulated in any way.
Bloomberg chat messages will be displayed as conversation threads, giving viewers the necessary context for better conversation analysis.
This, combined with real-time archiving, gives your team an easy way to monitor what’s happening and being communicated, fulfilling FINRA Rules 4511 and 3110.
You can also unify the archive of Bloomberg communications and other channels you’re using, including social media like Facebook or Twitter.
Tag Sharing and Improved Redaction
You can now share personal tags with other people within the organization and view the list of tags which they shared or which have been shared with them.
It’s also possible to stop sharing a personal tag and remove access to tagged items for the selected users.
If you’re a Jatheon Cloud user, you can find more information about tag sharing in this Jatheon Support Center article.
We also improved the Redaction feature to allow users to Edit Redactions.
Conclusion
While Bloomberg is the biggest tool for communication in the financial sector, it still needs to comply with strict FINRA regulations.
Unfortunately, Bloomberg doesn’t have native archiving capabilities, creating the need for third-party solutions like Jatheon.
Bloomberg archiving solutions provide your organization with the necessary functionality to stay compliant while enabling you to search and monitor your data at all times.
Stay compliant with FINRA and archive your Bloomberg messages with Jatheon’s archiving solution. Capture data automatically, find important information, and manage your Bloomberg data with ease.
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