“I Only Date Guys With Bloomberg Terminals”
Yes, I actually once heard that line on the trading floor. I still cringe when I think about it, yet it reminds me how embedded in the culture those machines were. It came to mind at a dinner last week, when a former coworker brought up something really interesting about their prized Bloomberg Terminals:
We can’t talk about shit on there anymore
Apparently Bloomberg chat is becoming severely restricted and traders can no longer openly talk positions, are ‘strongly discouraged’ from discussing their personal lives, and most importantly, are banned from chatting with traders at other banks. The FT confirmed this, as JP Morgan, Goldman, and RBS have all indicated they’re going to ban “multi-firm chat rooms”.
Trading floors are a different place than my time through the 2000s, but if this trend continues, it will be a monumental cultural shift. It’s tough to describe how integral “IB” (Instant Bloomberg) or “Bloomberg Chat” was to the entire social structure of the bank trading community.
My seven years in front of a Bloomberg Terminal made me see just how impressively their chat functionality developed. A timeline of what I saw:
When I started in 2002, we only had Bloomberg Messaging, which allowed users to simply static message each other within the Bloomberg ecosystem. I think it was maybe 2004 that Instant Bloomberg was introduced and began to write the book on product stickiness.
Soon, you were either on Bloomberg or you “didn’t exist”. It was an obnoxious, yet incredibly common networking practice to meet someone and instead of exchanging business cards, you’d promise to just ‘find them on Bloomberg’. If you weren’t a subscriber it instantly impacted your credibility with potential clients. It became an effective rite of passage for a young trader to “get their Bloomberg”.
This developed into an odd social protocol. When you first met a potential business contact, you MSG’ed (Bloomberg Messaging) them. If both parties felt it was a worthwhile connection, you’ d step it up to IB (chat). If you became business besties, you would create a ‘recurring’ chat room, meaning every time you loaded up your Terminal the chat room would automatically open. A recurring chat relationship wasn’t something you jumped right into. It meant something.
I’m not exaggerating about the “relationship” aspect of this. The absurdity of this hit a high point when my friend made the comment about only dating guys with Terminals. I cringe thinking about that line, yet she almost had an argument. Almost. At the time nearly all other forms of communication were blocked. If the object of your affection was on IB, you could set up a recurring chat room and have an open line of communication to them, all day long (one can debate the relative merits of this).
Even when I moved to the Financial Times, salespeople for premium products used IB to engage with clients and leads. It somehow seemed less intrusive to send an Instant Bloomberg than a cold call or email. There was also again that element of social validation: if you could afford the subscription people perceived your product was of higher value. It justified that subscription price.
Bloomberg’s simple chat functionality has come to define Warren Buffett’s idea of economic castles surrounded by unbreachable moats. It’s ubiquity across the financial community made it the communications mode of choice for any large bank or fund participant. Either you were on Bloomberg, or you weren’t.
The company is now in a very precarious situation: it has to balance the indispensable compliance needs of its biggest customers against its most powerful lock-in, it’s chat functionality. As it begins to lose its grip as the center of communications for the financial industry, the question of “is it worth the price” becomes a lot more difficult to answer. Is it just becoming a really, really expensive chat app?
