Bloomberg Vault Adds Jefferies Group to Growing Client List

Nearly 700 firms have now adopted Bloomberg Vault, a managed service that helps corporations meet compliance, regulatory and e-discovery requirements related to enterprise communications such as e-mail, social and instant message.

Facing mounting cost of information management, Jefferies Group, a major global investment bank with 3,800 employs and 30+ offices worldwide, adopted Bloomberg Vault's cloud based archiving service to lower costs and manage their growing volume of enterprise data.

Jefferies opted in for the increasingly popular Personal Vault feature, also known as End User Search, which allows employees to search their own messages from Microsoft Outlook stored in Bloomberg Vault.

"Jefferies is a representative example of the kind of investment firm that uses Bloomberg Vault," said Harald Collet, global business manager of Bloomberg Vault in an interview. "However, there are nearly 700 companies using Bloomberg Vault including regional banks, broker dealers, insurance companies, and other companies that aren't institutional investment firms."

[For more on Bloomberg Vault see: Bloomberg Vault Plays Role in Social Media Compliance ]

Bloomberg Vault archives a wide range of fragmented communications that legacy e-mail archiving platforms were not designed to handle, from Tweets and voice to Yammer and Skype messages, all in a consolidated infrastructure. eDiscovery helps firms to reconstruct trades using all communications well within the 72-hours dictated by Dodd-Frank regulations.

"A hosted solution, or managed service, is more cost effective and allows a company to focus limited IT resources on things that matter to the firm and create competitive business advantage -instead of managing a wide variety of unstructured data in inflexible legacy systems that cannot meet the new regulatory demands." said Collet. "Clients are selecting - and making the choice for -managed services. Typically financial services firms want to work with vendors that have domain expertise solving the regulatory and data manage challenges that are specific to their industry. They want to work with someone that knows and understands financial services - and that's Bloomberg."

The Bloomberg network handles more than 220 million messages and 65 billion archived messages per day.

Costs

Hany Doss, Senior Vice President, Technology at Jefferies says in the press release: "The search and retrieval across the consolidated archive offers a major improvement for our employees as well as the eDiscovery and IT teams. We will realize meaningful operational savings from Bloomberg Vault in the coming years."

Meaningful savings are indeed the goal, but with most IT spend going towards keeping the lights on, many are still hesitant to fund the migration from onsite to hosted solutions.

Most clients that are looking at migrating from on-site systems to a managed service realize that there is a 'switching cost' which can be a capital cost or one-time data extraction cost. Most firms would want to see a return on investment within 12-24 months, explains Collet.

"However, that varies. Some clients see an immediate benefit because they're able to respond right away much more quickly to a particular legal or regulatory event, or they may be able to avoid a fine because they made the investment in a more comprehensive approach to information governance." It's client specific but Collet says Vault have done a lot of analysis and it's clear that the average firm moving from onsite setup to a managed service see concrete savings.

An IDC study, commissioned by Bloomberg in June 2011, found that "firms that employ licensed on-premise archiving solutions to meet their IT, compliance and eDiscovery objectives pay a large premium right from the implementation phase of the solution. In fact, a representative mid-sized financial services organization that adopts a SaaS-based archiving solution (such as Bloomberg Vault) can gain up to 45% in savings over 3 years as compared to an on-premise deployed archiving solution." 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