Tear Down That Corporate Firewall

For my friends still working in the trading world, I’m often their “guy” for questions on whatever shiny, new tech thing is out there. When it comes to Twitter, I’ve been harping for a few years on how they need to become fluent in it. Last week, after the AP’s Twitter account was hacked, and a bogus tweet about explosions in the White House caused an instant drop in the stock market, I got a flurry of emails to the tune of “so this is what we get from your fancy Twitter?”

Information flow as a trader at a large bank can be an odd exercise. For years I sat in front of four screens, using platforms like a Bloomberg Terminal, Reuters, internal chat rooms, and a host of other options to monitor news from every corner of the world. Trying to get an information edge was our lifeblood, especially as I was focused on the economies of emerging, opaque markets.

Even though the bank spent thousands every month on fancy information systems for our team, since it was a massive corporation, all the traditional corporate firewall practices applied. Gmail and Gchat, Facebook, Skype and any other communication tools the bank deemed threatening were blocked. It wasn’t just social platforms or external email, up and coming financial blogs like Zerohedge and Dealbreaker were also blocked.

We survived on information, yet the bank actively worked to restrict potentially valuable channels.

Bloomberg recently announced that it was going to incorporate Twitter streams into it’s Terminal product. This made me smile. It was a huge validation of how valuable the information being produced in the social media world can be, and that it’s simply impossible to ignore. Of course, some people blamed this inclusion for the chaos that resulted from the hacked AP tweet, but that ignores the bigger picture. Industries that survive on information are accepting they can no longer ignore the social media world. There will be hiccups along the way and lessons learned, but the broader corporate world is finally coming around.

To put how oddly this transition is playing out in perspective, I was asking a friend still at Bank of America about his Twitter access. He told me Twitter.com is blocked and he can’t download any desktop Twitter clients, yet can now access Twitter via Bloomberg. He concluded by pointing out the most important reason this breakdown in corporate firewalls is accelerating :

“Dude, we have smartphones. We just access it on there.”