Innovating a modern icon: How Bloomberg keeps the Terminal cutting-edge
June 08, 2022
Forty years ago, Bloomberg entered the trading technology space with a killer new digital tool: the Bloomberg Terminal. It quickly became a source for lightning-fast access to financial market data, powerful analytics, and a connected network of financial professionals and business leaders. Continuous innovation on the Terminal has cemented Bloomberg’s status as one of the most important technology firms in history.
“The word ‘revolutionary’ is watered down these days,” says Fahd Arshad, UX Manager in the Office of the CTO at Bloomberg. “But if you put yourself in the shoes of Mike and the other founders trying to break into that subset of the financial space — I don’t think you can use a different word to refer to this solution, which leapfrogged many others at the time.”
(1:40) Learn how we continuously innovate to keep redefining what’s possible with the iconic Bloomberg Terminal.
We’re constantly breaking new ground.
When we launched the Bloomberg Terminal, it was revolutionary. And 40 years later, our engineers continue to innovate to keep it on the cutting edge.
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User-centric, before it was cool
In the early ‘80s, at the dawn of the personal computing revolution, operating a computer required a highly technical skill set, which wasn’t common in finance. For Bloomberg’s founders, designing and building a new solution for this industry from the baseboard up presented a whole other set of challenges.
Creating the Bloomberg Terminal’s hardware, software, and network infrastructure to connect financial professionals to information about the markets required foresight that the markets would become digitized, thereby making financial information more readily available. This meant financial professionals would need new tools to access and engage with that information. And, since they weren’t technically proficient and couldn’t build such a system themselves, they needed someone to innovate and do it for them.
More than a decade before the term “user experience” was coined, the Terminal’s evolution was inspired and guided by how users needed to interact with new technology in the real world.
“Bloomberg has always placed the user at the center of design,” says CTO Shawn Edwards. “We labor over every pixel that goes onto the screen. The functionality of the Terminal evolves in three ways: in response to client feedback, in partnership with clients through mutual innovation, and by anticipating client needs – even before those needs have been articulated.”
Bloomberg’s sales force collaborates closely with and provides customer feedback to the company’s Product teams.
“When I joined in ‘99, we had a rudimentary market monitor called “M,” says Mark Flatman, Global Head of Core Product, who previously led EMEA Sales. “It allowed you to create a list of stuff you were interested in tracking, whether that be stocks, bonds, or currencies. It was very popular.”
As customers used “M”, they found new ways they wanted to use it, which they shared with their sales reps. When a customer said, “I need this tool to do X,” that information was fed back to the Product team, driving innovation into future versions of the tool. “M” evolved into “W,” or the Worksheet, and eventually “NW” — New Worksheet.
“It was a completely customized desktop that you could build and shape as you wanted, not only in terms of the content, but the cosmetics of it,” says Flatman.
In time, that New Worksheet evolved into Launchpad. This user-customizable work environment allows subscribers to combine multiple functions into a single view on their desktop to monitor securities, news, analysis, and more. Often, Bloomberg Terminal subscribers have multiple monitors to allow them to keep track of hundreds of different securities and conduct analysis on their portfolios. So Bloomberg needed to provide them with a multi-component interface that delivers all this market data and news and refreshes their screens in real time.
“You could build and customize Launchpad around other things that were on your desktop, whether that be an internal application or pieces of an Excel spreadsheet,” adds Flatman. “That was pretty unusual at the time, particularly for a service provider that had such reach across multiple asset classes. It was a massive game-changer.”
Continuous Innovation
Paul Williams, one of the leaders in the Application Frameworks team, has been working on core Terminal functionality for more than two decades. During his tenure at Bloomberg, he’s seen a number of Terminal innovations that have redefined what’s possible.
The initial Bloomberg product was literally a computer terminal – a display plugged into custom hardware in a closet somewhere, connected via bright yellow hose-like cables that snaked across the trading floor, giving the impression the pipes were delivering liquid data. “The first graphical function was a monochrome yield curve; just a simple line on the screen alongside text.”
As PCs became more commonplace, the Bloomberg Terminal was ported to run on standard PC hardware in the late 80s. Williams joined the company in the mid-90s. “I was tasked with enhancing the graphics capability of the Terminal, and took the opportunity to develop a plug-in framework that allowed the Terminal to display rich visualizations and show more than one component simultaneously within each panel. For the first time, we could build functions you could actually live in, rather than just run for an instantaneous analytic. So you might actually spend hours sitting inside one of these functions as your analysis or trading environment.”
In 2002, Williams prototyped the idea of dragging the sub-components from within an NW panel out to the desktop. Because of Bloomberg’s open and flat structure, he was able to demonstrate this to senior managers. Very quickly, a team was formed to turn this concept into a major new feature of the product – Launchpad – providing a new paradigm where users could have hundreds of components across all of their screen desktops.
“From a technical perspective, this was a tiny change, but one that was revolutionary for our customers,” says Williams. “We loved being a group of technologists who were actually influencing the direction of the Terminal product itself.”
Over time, features were added – the ability to “dock” components to each other as if they were magnetic; the concept of “security groups,” where components could be linked such that changing the security displayed in one affected all other components in the group; multiple pages with fast switching between. Also added was the capability to share Launchpad pages, allowing an ecosystem to be built where one person on a trading desk could maintain a Launchpad page that everyone on that desk can use.
Getting work done with finance’s first social network
Launchpad subsequently became the basis for many other new initiatives – particularly long-lived components in which users spend much of their day, including trading blotters, sophisticated analytic toolboxes, and, another groundbreaking core Terminal feature: Instant Bloomberg (IB). This innovation, released in September 2003, became “one of the most powerful things we ever did,” says Flatman.
Prior to the release of IB, Terminal users could send emails back and forth. IB brought chat-like instant messaging to the financial world, and the technology soon became a part of users’ professional lives.
The prototype IB was initially developed as a tool to allow Bloomberg engineers to communicate with each other in a more immediate way – it was a hobby project for a half dozen infrastructure developers. Senior product managers had the foresight to experiment with it to offer customers a way to quickly communicate with Bloomberg customer service, and then started making it available for customers to try among themselves to see if it was useful.
It immediately met a different need for clients, instantaneously connecting them with their colleagues and counterparts in the Bloomberg network, backed up by the tight security and compliance rules of the Bloomberg system so they could be confident they always knew who they were communicating with. Williams says, “The infrastructure we had built for NW and Launchpad enabled us to immediately add ground-breaking features relevant to our customers such as live real-time stock prices within a chat.”
Opening up the box
Over the last four decades, the Terminal has evolved from being a closed system rooted in proprietary hardware to being a software interface accessible from many devices. The Terminal is now an entry point that gives users access to an ecosystem of financial data, analytics tools, and a communications network.
“The original Terminal was a standalone desktop device and there wasn’t much communication between it and the other things you had on your desk,” explains Ash Brown, Bloomberg’s Head of UX. “What’s mainly changed about the Terminal is how it is integrated into your overall workflow and how it is contextually relevant to the other things you’re doing.”
One of the biggest shifts for the Terminal over the past decade is Bloomberg’s embrace of open source technologies. As more functionality was added and ever more data became available, it became clear that in-house development alone would not be scalable. One notable example of the organization’s adoption of open source was the embedding of Chromium, the open source browser co-developed mostly by Google and the open source community, to power the Terminal’s front-end.
“Adopting Chromium further revolutionized the Terminal,” says Williams. “For the first time, UX designers could design visual elements, and experts in human-computer interaction (HCI) could start to define workflows for functions. From a programming perspective, this also revolutionized how we developed the UI stack, allowing us to be more compliant with standards, such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, integrated with hardware graphics acceleration capabilities and accessibility systems, and providing a far richer and more expressive platform than one we could build ourselves with a small team. Combining the most advanced open source browser technology with our own real-time data processing technology has given us what I consider to be the best real-time browser you can buy.”
The Terminal now runs open source code not just in its interface, but throughout its underlying tech stack.
“We realized that having an entirely proprietary software stack is not sustainable,” says Yan Meng, Global Head of Application Frameworks. “We gave it a lot of thought and decided to take advantage of the sheer scale of resources the community is able to throw behind specific technology stacks.”
Because so much of what the Terminal has to do is unique in terms of both function and scale, Bloomberg has also taken an active role in pioneering open source tech.
“We can’t just take other people’s technology, build it into our software, and hope for the best,” says Meng. “The only way to innovate and be part of the driving force behind those technologies is to be fully aligned as part of the community, and to lead where it matters most.”
For example, Bloomberg engineers are deeply involved in standards committees driving the evolution of the C++, JavaScript, and Python programming languages. They regularly propose and spearhead the development of new language features that are valuable not only to Bloomberg, but to the overall community. Examples include Allocators in C++ (which led to the PMR model in C++17), and Private Class Fields in JavaScript/TypeScript.
“The strategy is to embrace, to participate, to influence, and to lead,” says Meng.
The Terminal’s AI-powered future
Forty years ago, the Terminal’s original mission was to provide data to information-hungry financial professionals. Today, financial information is gathered from incalculable volumes of both structured and unstructured data, and the core problem financial professionals face isn’t a lack of data, but too much of it. Our users look to the Terminal to help them curate that flood of real-time market data and other financial news and information so they can monitor, analyze, and trade on that data.
As they look ahead to the next 40 years, the Terminal’s developers expect AI to play an increasingly central role in helping clients cut through all the noise.
“Early on, one of the big challenges was figuring out how a user navigates all the complex functionality the Terminal offers,” says Edwards. “So Bloomberg innovated a hierarchical menu system.”
Over time, as more features were added, it became more challenging for users to quickly find what they needed. The first solution was an auto-complete feature, now commonplace on most smart devices, in which the system provides suggested search results as the user types. But oftentimes, users don’t know what to type to find what they’re looking for. Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology now allows users to ask questions in plain human language.
Similarly, IB is charting new territory with AI. The messaging tool revolutionized how financial professionals communicate, and has continuously evolved to play a more central role in all kinds of collaboration. Flatman’s teams have been working with the company’s engineers on new features in IB that enable users to share documents, videos, photos, and objects within conversations (“pills”) which can be acted upon in various ways.
In a world where traders across the financial industry might have hundreds of chat windows open at a time, AI chatbot technology might play a role in helping sort and automate some of these conversations.
“Some queries are really important, like a request for a quote, and you want to get to that faster than your peers,” says Edwards. “Others are important, but can take a little more time, like a request for market research. Sometimes it’s just relationship building, like chatter about last night’s Yankees game.” Bloomberg has built AI to help users sort queries with an intent model that can distinguish between different types of content within them.
“Now you have an AI that’s helping people sift through their communication so they can prioritize,” says Edwards. “This combination of humans plus AI is incredibly powerful.” The same NLP tech can help users sift through news to find the signal of relevant information in a sea of noise. These applications are just a couple of examples of what AI is making possible within the Terminal.
“Smart people are regularly coming up with new ways of generating, analyzing, and visualizing data,” says Paul Williams. “If we stand still, we will miss opportunities to improve the product in ways that are beneficial to clients. And the volume of data relentlessly increases, so we also have to find ways of scaling our existing solutions so they keep up with the data.”
Williams speculates that the future of the Terminal may not only involve a screen. Maybe it will be activated through voice commands or information will be relayed to the user via augmented reality (AR). Whatever that future looks like, Bloomberg’s engineers are committed to staying ahead by always focusing on the user and embracing the best technology available.