Now Banks Can Track Traders' Naughty Instant Messages In Real Time And Block Certain Words

The Libor rigging affair, for example, had traders promising each other booze and sushi for interest rate cooperation.

Banks didn't like that (at least afterwards). So as a result, Bloomberg has rolled out a new "Compliance Center" on its terminals to streamline the process by which firms make sure their traders aren't doing illegal things.

According to Bloomberg, the new center is "a single location containing administration, monitoring, search, and retention capabilities designed to give a comprehensive, real-time view into firm-wide communications."

Compliance officers can now hit "CMPC " on their terminals, according to the FT, to "bring up a screen allowing them a range of options, including monitoring employees' communications or blocking words, whether profanities or perhaps - given traders' record of promising each other alcoholic incentives - 'Bollinger'".

Bloomberg's clients have been cracking down internally on mischievous trader chats. According to one report, JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon told his London office, "Don't exaggerate, don't ruminate, don't bullshit," over chat.

At least they have Snapchat.

Check out the full release from Bloomberg below:

Compliance Made Easy: Introducing the Bloomberg Compliance Center

Bloomberg pioneered one of the first private messaging systems in the early 1990s. Today, Bloomberg subscribers send more than 15 million instant messages - and 200 million emails - every day. Recently, there has been discussion around the use of chat rooms, and our clients have expressed interest in more precise and reliable communication-related compliance tools.

While market participants rely on the security, stability and consistency of the Instant Bloomberg chat service to view securities, share information and engage in trade negotiations, compliance officers want a better way to manage these communications. That is why we centralized our existing compliance tools into the Bloomberg Compliance Center: a single location containing administration, monitoring, search, and retention capabilities designed to give a comprehensive, real-time view into firm-wide communications. Compliance tools have always been available on Instant Bloomberg, but we felt it important to centralize this information onto one dashboard.

The Bloomberg Compliance Center provides authorized users with direct access to:

• Real-time Monitoring: A complete, real-time view for compliance professionals of all firm-wide message and chat communications generated within the Bloomberg system.
• Exception Reporting: Allows compliance officers to establish firm-wide policies by keyword, relationship parameters, and language context, and blocks unauthorized communications before they are sent.
• Administration: Provides controls to enable or disable anonymous chats within a firm, as well as providing alerts when new chats are created or changes are made to existing chats.
• Chat Room Participation Reports: Creates a comprehensive report of existing and historical chats in which employees are participating.
• Communications Search and Retrieval: Customers can store, search and download up to five years of firm-wide communications.
• Bloomberg Vault Integration: Full integration with Bloomberg Vault, a hosted compliance archiving and e-discovery application, available separately. Bloomberg Vault provides an expanded set of compliance tools, including enhanced search, archiving and retrieval as a managed service.

In addition to the Bloomberg Compliance Center, we're developing stronger reporting capabilities and permissioning tools that enable authorized firm administrators to better manage multi-party chat room participation. Our customers understand the important value that Instant Bloomberg provides in conducting their business; they also want state-of-the-art compliance tools to ensure sustained success.

As an independent company with a customer base of both buy and sell-side firms, Bloomberg serves a unique and important role in the financial markets. At Bloomberg, our focus is always on helping our clients more effectively achieve their goals and objectives. As new regulations and market complexities shape the financial world, we will continue to be responsive to our customers' needs and growing market demands.