Bloomberg Vault Rolls Out Cloud Voice Recording Service

With new regulations requiring financial firms to record and manage voice recordings of traders and other front office professionals, organizations are struggling to find ways to comply with the rules without putting excessive stress on existing technology and compliance staff.

In order to help global customers manage their voice recording and archiving, Bloomberg Vault has partnered with Orange Business Services -Trading Solutions to provide an integrated voice offering, alongside Vault's existing communication and information management service. Orange already records voice communications for 1,300 trading floors in 50 countries.

"This partnership is in response to an increased regulatory focus on voice recording and archiving," says Harald Collet, global business manager, Bloomberg Vault. "Regulators in Europe and US are asking clients to implement new voice recording for traders. But the challenge with voice recording is that it has been traditionally recorded into stovepipe servers," which are hard to search and find specific voice recordings.

More importantly, adding voice recording to Vault allows compliance experts to search all forms of communication at once, including voice, email and, instant message communications. "We want clients to be able to do an integrated search," Collet says. "This way compliance officers can do a single search for everything. There is a burning demand for voice analytics and voice recording right now."

[For more on Bloomberg Vault, read: Bloomberg's Vault Cloud Service Goes Local.]

Voice analytics, according to Collet, involve looking for call patterns involving certain traders ,identifying certain spoken keywords on a call that might be important, as well as looking for patterns with email or instant messages. For instance, a compliance officer might look for a high number of calls to a specific outside number, as well as a flurry of instant messages to the same user. "Voice analytics, at a high level, gives you the ability to know, as accurately as possible, what was said on certain calls," he says. "Looking for patterns with voice, email and other messaging, is important."

Bloomberg Vault, launched in 2010, currently has 540 clients and handles 66 billion records. Collet says that Bloomberg Vault already manages "multi petabytes" of data for clients. With the addition of voice recording, the overall size of Vault's records will continue to grow quickly. Bloomberg Vault runs in approximately 120 data centers around the globe which are primarily owned by Bloomberg, according to Collet.

Currently the voice capability offered by Orange Business Services -Trading Solutions and Bloomberg Vault only records in-house calls coming from trading desks. Collet says there are plans to add mobile voice recording capabilities, as well as auto-transcription features in the future.

The integrated cloud service from Orange Business Services - Trading Solutions and Bloomberg Vault will be available to regulated industries that can leverage new or existing voice recording infrastructures. Orange Business Services - Trading Solutions' voice capability will feed Bloomberg Vault with data from phone calls stored in the voice recording systems. Once Bloomberg Vault has archived this data, compliance personnel will be able to execute a single search across all data formats such as email, instant messages, Bloomberg messaging, mobile, social media, proprietary messaging formats, and now voice records, to produce a consolidated transaction-record mapped to counter-parties.

Greg MacSweeney is editorial director of InformationWeek Financial Services, whose brands include Wall Street & Technology, Bank Systems & Technology, Advanced Trading, and Insurance & Technology. View Full Bio