Bloomberg Boosts FX Offerings with Targeted Real-Time News

Bloomberg Foreign Exchange offerings and news coverage just got bigger.

On Tuesday Bloomberg unveiled First Word Foreign Exchange (FX) to "provide customers actionable news, information and insights into the events affecting the global currency markets," according the press release. "This specialty news product is the latest addition to Bloomberg's FX offering and news coverage."

The 24 hour coverage of economic, geopolitical, and currency-specific news is produced by a global team of currency market experts and journalists. The real-time coverage aims to help Bloomberg subscribers following or trading FX make more informed decisions.

Robert Savage, chief strategist at FX Concepts says in the release, "We operate in a dynamic environment, and there is a constant flow of news and information. First Word FX distills the most important points to keep me informed and offers the in-depth analysis I need to understand the big picture."

Technology Challenges

First Word FX delivers foreign exchange news and updates through the Bloomberg professional service. According to Bloomberg in an e-mail, "Customers can access this information on a terminal or on a mobile device using Bloomberg Anywhere. Updates are sent out in real-time and accessed through the function FIRST . The news is also delivered via alerts so clients can access the information from their in-boxes." Furthermore, "First Word FX uses the same technology that Bloomberg has deployed in other asset classes covered by First Word, including fixed incomes and equities. Individual users can customize the feed so they see updates only for the currencies or regions they trade."

Bloomberg also writes that the new service did present a number of technology challenges: "To take advantage of the condensed structure of First Word news articles, developers built a new monitoring system for the feed that displays the text of each item in a running scroll, saving clients from clicking in and out of the individual headlines."

[To learn more about improving the end-user experience, register for Interop here and check out the “Case Study: Major Online Brokerage Combines People, Process, and Technology to Improve End-User Experience” session on October 3 in NYC.]

"First Word FX alerts were optimized to deliver bullet-point summaries for easy scanning on mobile devices. Bloomberg's social media monitoring tools were used to help First Word editors instantly react and link clients to the news when newsmakers posted news on Twitter or other platforms."

Bloomberg News platform has over one thousand different sources that scrape content and thousands of news organizations and feeds fully integrated into the platform. Becca Lipman is Senior Editor for Wall Street & Technology. She writes in-depth news articles with a focus on big data and compliance in the capital markets. She regularly meets with information technology leaders and innovators and writes about cloud computing, datacenters, ... View Full Bio