Staying compliant in any language

This article was written by Eugene Semetsky, Bloomberg Vault Product Manager.

The challenge of monitoring sensitive communications has become infinitely more complicated. Financial firms need to be compliant in a world that includes ever-evolving regulations, rapidly-growing data volumes, new communication platforms and remote employees spanning global markets.

Meanwhile, traditional surveillance programs are built on the assumption that everyone is communicating in the same language — typically English. In reality, financial professionals communicate in multiple languages –– including with slang and emojis –– and multilingual users are likely to switch between languages, whether out of habit or with the intent to circumvent supervisory policies and procedures.

As a recent report by financial management consultancy Opimas underscores, there are more than 6,000 languages spoken worldwide, with many of those used in the regions where Bloomberg operates, creating major gaps for surveillance and with serious consequences for compliance teams. Understanding and implementing an integrated compliance solution with robust foreign language tools and translation capabilities is critical.

In fact, multi-language capabilities aren’t simply “nice to have.” Under FINRA Rule 3110 governing supervision, firms must surveil any communications allowed by the organization, including in multiple languages. In Europe, the FCA’s Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II) and the SYSC 3.2 and 9.1 rules require similar safeguards.

Surveillance in any language

When surveilling communications, all language is subject to analysis, and that can be particularly challenging when it is a patchwork of lexicons, argots and, as is increasingly the case, symbols. While giving a “thumbs up” emoji may seem innocuous, it still signals intent and is, in fact, subject to review and potential escalation.

With customers spanning every continent and operations in more than 160 regional locations, Bloomberg recognizes the need to maintain a robust multi-language product offering. Bloomberg Vault — an integrated compliance and surveillance platform that helps firms aggregate, archive, and analyze their communications, trading, and voice data—continues in that tradition. Given the complexities of maintaining compliance in a global environment, Bloomberg Vault has a well-established multi-language capability today and is continuing to invest in and expand the platform’s multi-language offerings.

Bloomberg Vault’s current suite of e-discovery tools supports dozens of languages and allows users to search and extract data from any content channel ingested in any supported language. From a surveillance perspective, firms can easily customize their policies and rules by inserting lexicons in any modern language –– including emojis. Users can then identify, flag and review messages that contain keywords, phrases and symbols that are offensive, inflammatory or cover market-specific policies, such as conduct risk, market abuse and conflicts of interest, regardless of language. Bloomberg Vault also offers advanced functionality, including the ability to perform “tokenization” of languages that do not have traditional white spaces between words (think Japanese, Chinese and Korean) to clearly understand how surveillance policies are applied.

Beyond simply searching and surveilling in multiple languages, many non-native speakers are sometimes confronted with front-end applications that are only presented in English. Bloomberg Vault has been working on addressing this challenge by rolling out a host of new regionalization, translation, and UI enhancements. This new UI gives surveillance, risk, control and compliance teams the option of selecting multiple languages, including Japanese and Korean, with more Asian-Pacific and Romance languages coming soon. In addition, detailed end-user documentation is currently available in 10 languages, leveraging Bloomberg’s extensive in-house translation capabilities.^[1]

To expand its existing multi-language capabilities, Bloomberg Vault also recently began working with Technically Creative, a U.S.-based IT services provider and subject matter expert in foreign-language policy detection and regional policy/rule development. Through this partnership, Bloomberg Vault users will soon be able to take advantage of updated and enhanced surveillance policies, future foreign language and other specialized capabilities, including expanded Data Loss Prevention (DLP). In addition, Bloomberg is investing in Voice surveillance, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Advanced Analytics to draw deeper insights from the vast pool of electronic communications generated by users.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, risk and control teams, including compliance, were grappling with the challenges of staying compliant across various communication sources. Now, with remote work arrangements likely to be the norm for the foreseeable future, organizations need to get serious about adopting comprehensive solutions that allow them to proactively and automatically respond to potential risks and threats… regardless of language. Bloomberg Vault is a critical tool in their arsenal that enables them to do just that.

About Bloomberg Vault

Bloomberg Vault is an integrated compliance and surveillance solution designed to help global financial service customers meet their regulatory obligations and business standards. Built on Big Data technologies, Bloomberg Vault’s surveillance solution is highly scalable and enables search filtering, results and reports to complete within seconds across large date ranges, and offers an extensive suite of features. Unique capabilities include the ability to apply interactive “pre-send” controls on Bloomberg MSG and Instant Bloomberg (IB), internal Information Barriers to meet ethical wall requirements, and the ability to regularly feed in Restricted List lexicons into Surveillance policies. These features are complemented by rich, interactive reporting, powerful user-management features, and more than 40 pre-built policies, with the ability to customize and create new ones.

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^[1] Available languages include English, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Korean, and Russian.