How Bloomberg uses machine learning to create a competitive advantage
Bloomberg is using machine-learning technology to exploit its vast data sets of financial information and create game-changing innovations for its staff and customers.
According to Chief Technology Officer Shawn Edwards, his office is harnessing the power of emerging technology to develop new products and services. Edwards says the potential for change is significant:
I think the application of machine learning to financial data is exciting. It’s something that we’re focusing on in the CTO office. We need to think about our how our customers are changing how the marketplace is changing. A lot of what we do is centred on internal infrastructure, but we also do some product incubation – and some of those ideas and concepts eventually become products.
To this end, Edwards says his team is currently leading an effort to build a data model. This model includes metadata frameworks and database ontologies. While the use of models, frameworks and ontologies is nothing new to Bloomberg, Edwards says it’s the first time the company has allowed people to programmatically access its data:
Edwards says the new data model is, in short, about bringing together all the financial data the firm holds, exposing that to internal and external customers, and then building tools on top of that information so that people can create new insight. Machine-learning tools will be a part of the suite of capabilities that the firm offers to its customers. Edwards expects those developments to bring benefits to Bloomberg’s clients:
They can explore more ideas. Someone might, for example, have a hypothesis that they can run price prediction on retail sales. That was hard to do before – they might have had a great idea, but they couldn’t do it. In the near future, they’ll be able to do that experiment, explore, and see if it has validity in relatively short order. And then, if something does have value, put it into production.
Bloomberg is currently building a data science platform for its customers, which Edwards says is “really exciting”. The development – which is a scientific computing environment based on open-source software – is being led by the CTO office. The platform includes all the maths and scientific libraries that are required for high-level computation. The platform also includes a rich visualisation layer built using open-source technology bqplot, which provides a way to use and build charts and graphs:
The value we’re offering to our customers is the fact that you can have access to all this data programmatically.
