Kunai Partners With Bloomberg L.P. to Provide Clients With MiFID II Compliant Communications Platform

Bloomberg L.P. is a financial, software, data, and media company whose name is synonymous with data financial insights. They operate a comprehensive suite of products and services including the Bloomberg Terminal, Bloomberg News, Bloomberg Intelligence, and Bloomberg Law. Since its founding in 1981, the company’s insights have been enabling decision makers and industry leaders to stay ahead of the curve. Bloomberg is headquartered in New York City and has offices in more than 120 countries.

Bloomberg services many of the largest financial firms in the world, and many financial organizations rely on Bloomberg’s services for their day-to-day operations.

In 2018, the European Union published a new financial regulation, MiFID II. In summary, the new regulation pushed for stricter control regarding the recording and archiving of communications between financial organizations. It required firms to capture all electronic communications that are intended to lead to a trade or order, even if they are not actually executed.

Given the immense explosion of new communication channels, increased telecommunications governance became an increasingly daunting task. With the EU’s MiFID II compliance directive threatening to shake up the status quo, Bloomberg's clients looked to them to help make the transition. And Bloomberg, in turn, looked to Kunai.

Of the many services Bloomberg provides, more than 6,000 organizations use Bloomberg Vault. With so many clients communicating via Bloomberg Vault, it could be the key to MiFID II compliance as updating the platform to address the new compliance requirements would give organizations a one-stop-shop for regulation compliance.

Bloomberg partnered with Kunai to update their Bloomberg Vault platform. Kunai’s experience adapting to new financial compliance regulations, reputation for swift development, and deep expertise of FinTech APIs and platforms enabled them to immediately understand what needed to be done.

Kunai began UI and UX updates concurrently with platform updates. They worked with the Bloomberg team to build out a website front end "Compliance Console" that would visualize an organization’s compliance risks at a glance. This would be the quickest way for an organization to understand their standing with new compliance changes.

Kunai’s compliance experts worked together with developers to conduct a compliance audit, ensuring that the existing Bloomberg Vault platform was fully compliant. From there, they went on to design a compliance-first development plan for full production.

Finally, Kunai’s developers worked together with Bloomberg's teams to build and integrate new back-end systems to capture, store, and analyze all communications according to MiFID II standards. Organizations would automatically opt-in to the new compliance ready features, allowing them to archive emails, chats, phone calls, and Bloomberg trade data.

Since the update, Bloomberg Vault has become an essential tool for businesses to remain compliant across different directives.

The platform delivers cross-system analytics through an intuitive UI, allowing clients to reconstruct trade and communication timelines with quick and powerful searches. With region-specific regulation on the rise, Kunai is proud to help evolve the Vault and enable Bloomberg and its clients to continue doing business in a global marketplace.

“We pride ourselves in our immense expertise in all facets of the financial industry. We had already discussed internally what we should do in response to the upcoming MiFID II regulations, so when Bloomberg approached us, we already knew what to do. And so did Bloomberg. Our teams worked together like clockwork, it was definitely a sight to behold.” - Neil Tolani, Founder at Kunai.