This one-on-one mentoring program, which up-skills Black students by improving their coding fluency and interview readiness, followed a similar model to the one that Bloomberg’s recruiting team successfully organized in the summer of 2021 together with the Bloomberg Latinx Community’s tech group (BLC Tech) that focused on Latinx candidates at four Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) in Puerto Rico, and which resulted in multiple hires.

The program’s success was summed up by two of the computer science students who shared how going through the BBIT Accelerator Program helped contribute to their successfully getting hired into full-time roles with Bloomberg:[vc_column width="3/12"]

Ernst FanFan

Kennesaw State University

“Bloomberg’s Accelerator program gave me exactly what I was missing to get hired! While I had the knowledge I had earned through my studies and experience, I was still missing the know-how about interviewing for positions. The program gave me the feedback and practice I needed to navigate these interviews. I learned there is more to interviewing than just the application of knowledge; there is a collaborative and storytelling aspect that many new to the job scene simply don’t know about. The prep sessions helped me understand this and also gave me examples of what to do and what not to do, and the weekly meetings with my mentor gave me a safe environment to practice these new principles and skills. In the end, I was able to master these new techniques and use them to better showcase my knowledge, past experience, and collaborative skills.”[vc_column width="2/12"][vc_column width="3/12"][vc_column width="1/12"][vc_column width="6/12"]

Gregory Ross, Jr.

Software Engineer, AIM Order Blotter Workflow
& Brooklyn College graduate

“The BBIT Accelerator Program significantly inspired my decision to join Bloomberg. Conway, my mentor during the program, was extremely supportive and transparent regarding Bloomberg's culture and work life. During the program, there was an emphasis put on engineering and Bloomberg's commitment to outreach to the underrepresented communities in tech. This aligned well with my career goals. I'm excited for the journey to come.”[vc_column width="2/12"]

We also asked some of the mentors what they had learned while mentoring these Black engineering students. Here are some of the lessons and personal experiences they shared:

[vc_column width="3/12"]

José Rivera-Santuche

Engineering Team Lead, EMSX Routing Workflows

“HBCU students have the passion to learn and improve themselves. As a mentor, I enjoyed spending time with a passionate mentee and seeing their constant growth on a weekly basis. Definitely a good fit for our Bloomberg Engineering culture.”[vc_column width="2/12"]

[vc_column width="3/12"]

Aram Chung

Software Engineer, Insights Relevancy

“Mentoring in a pandemic, where my lovely mentee was in another state, I learned how virtual learning can broaden our reach. In general, opportunity shouldn't be restricted by geography.”

[vc_column width="3/12"]

Conway Tang

Engineering Team Lead, BQL Data Provider SDK

“I learned that anyone can provide the initial seed and make an amplified impact. As a BBIT Accelerator Mentor, I had the opportunity to work alongside my mentee as they worked through the challenge first-hand and succeeded. Giving is receiving. As a past accelerator participant, the mentee will now be able to carry on the ideology, and be an ambassador to make an amplified impact.”

[vc_column width="3/12"]

Sarah Yu

Software Engineer, ESG Integration

"Through this experience, I learned that a program held over the course of multiple weeks means we get to form a real relationship with the Accelerator participants, understand their goals, and tailor the sessions to them. I got to work with such a genuine and dedicated Accelerator student who was studying abroad in Denmark the whole time! It made it all the more rewarding that they succeeded.”

[vc_column width="3/12"]

Terrence Crossdale

Senior Software Engineer, Consumer Web Marketing/Lead Generation

“Having the opportunity to be a mentor was very self-reflective and fulfilling in a variety of ways. It allowed me to realize and appreciate my own career path, while also being able to correlate it to my mentee's in a more personal way. I was proud and inspired of the way my mentee embraced all of my tips and advice that I shared, while demonstrating consistent growth throughout the program.”

Photo credit: Henry Danner (IG: @henrydanner.photo)
Outfits styled by: Ilbert J. Sanchez (https://www.garconcouture.com; IG: @garconcouture)

[vc_column width="3/12"]

Bhavya Kumari

Engineering Team Leader, FXGO Cash Pricing & Execution

“I always find mentoring is a two-way learning process. You teach your mentees, while at the same time learning so much from them as well. The HBCU mentoring experience taught me to be more aware of the challenges that students are facing in the remote learning environment, be it a lack of group study opportunities or a nice and quiet setup. Plus, it's always motivating to see the growth in the student participants.”[vc_column width="3/12"]

Tuba Opel

Software Engineer, Data Services

“It was a great mentorship experience. My mentee had recently switched her major to computer science because of her newfound love for coding. This reminded me of my own journey, so it was quite fulfilling to be mentoring her at this stage. I learned that having the right encouragement at an early stage of one's career can be quite impactful, especially for individuals from communities that are underrepresented in tech.”[vc_column width="3/12"]

Keyong Li

Team Lead, Application Frameworks

“One-on-one and face-to-face mentoring (even if done remotely) can make a huge difference.”[vc_column width="3/12"]

Deji Akinyemi

Senior Software Engineer, Asset and Investment Management (AIM)

“The intentionality, hard work, and perseverance demonstrated by my mentee reminded me of the humility needed to excel in the fields of software development and engineering. I also learnt gratitude, through the honor of being able to contribute to the success of another.”[vc_column width="3/12"]

Pratik Karia

Engineering Group Manager, AIM

“It was incredibly motivating and satisfying to see my efforts lead to pivotal changes in my mentee's career aspirations. In many ways, this program helps mentees build their confidence and belief in themselves.”[vc_column width="3/12"]

Meshach Jones

Software Engineer, AIM Compliance System

“I learnt the power of knowledge transfers & personal experience. You often take for granted the experiences you've lived through & the huge impact it can have on others through mentorship.”[vc_column width="3/12"]

Ranesh Uzoka

Senior Software Engineer, IOI

“HBCU engineering students are passionate about tech. They just need the right opportunity.”

The post Bloomberg Black in Tech mentors improve coding fluency & interview readiness of Black engineering students appeared first on Tech At Bloomberg.

In addition, Anju Kambadur, Head of Bloomberg’s AI Engineering group, will be keynoting the half-day AAAI-22 Workshop on Knowledge Discovery from Unstructured Data in Financial Services (KDF 2022) at 10:15 AM PST on Tuesday, March 1, 2022. His keynote talk, “Search and Discovery in News and Research," will look at various ways Bloomberg’s decade-long investment in NLP, information retrieval and search, and core machine learning (including deep learning) is enabling the application of autocompletion, query understanding, index enrichment, question answering, summarization, and relevance ranking so that the company’s clients across the global capital markets can discover insightful information from the complexity of unstructured data.

In the papers being published at AAAI 2022, the authors and their collaborators — among them past Bloomberg Data Science Ph.D. Fellow Hao Tan, a recipient of a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his advisor, Professor Mohit Bansal, who leads the MURGe-Lab (Multimodal Understanding, Reasoning, and Generation for Language Lab), one of the research labs in the UNC NLP group — present contributions to fundamental NLP problems in the areas of paraphrase generation and chart summarization.

We asked the authors of the papers to summarize their research and explain why the results were notable in advancing the state-of-the-art in the field of natural language processing:

Main Conference

Poster Session 2 (Thursday, February 24 @ 4:45-6:30 PM PST)
Oral Session 2 (Thursday, February 24 @ 6:30-7:45 PM PST)
Poster Session 7 (Saturday, February 26, 2022 @ 8:45-10:30 AM PST)
Novelty Controlled Paraphrase Generation with Retrieval Augmented Conditional Prompt Tuning (video)
Jishnu Ray Chowdhury (University of Illinois Chicago), Yong Zhuang and Shuyi Wang (Bloomberg)

Paraphrase novelty refers to how different a generated sentence is from the reference one, while expressing the same meaning. Our work focuses on the problem of allowing a user to control the level of novelty in the generated paraphrases. As is standard now, we rely on generative large-scale pre-trained language models for generation. To this end, we use prompt tuning, and generation is based on the prompting template:

INPUT:<reference-sentence>;PARAPHRASE:_______

We learn different prefix (INPUT) and infix (PARAPHRASE) embeddings for different novelty classes, such as High, Medium, and Low. Users can then explicitly determine the level of generation by choosing which embeddings they will use. In Table 2 below, we show some example generations by specifying the diversity in our proposed method Novelty Conditioned Retrieval Augmented Prompt Tuning (NC-RAPT). Using prompt tuning saves us from the need to fine-tune the complete large-scale language model, which is an inefficient process. We augment input prompts by retrieving semantically similar inputs from the training dataset. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first works utilizing prompt tuning on the task of paraphrase generation.

Why are these results notable?

Shuyi: The large number of trainable parameters is a pain point for large-scale language models since they not only require a long time to train, but also require large amounts of data. By leveraging prompt tuning, the number of traininable parameters is reduced by orders of magnitude. More importantly, we demonstrate that even with a much smaller number of parameters, it is possible to achieve strong results. Also, to the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first works to explore prompt tuning on the task of paraphrase generation.

How does your work advance the state-of-the-art in the field of NLP?

Yong: While there have been many works utilizing large-scale language models (e.g., GPT models) on the task of paraphrase generation, existing works put less emphasis on the novelty of generated sentences. In addition, training large-scale language models is costly in terms of data and compute power. To mitigate these requirements, our work takes advantage of prompt-tuning and demonstrates its effectiveness on the paraphrase generation task. Furthermore, we use a retrieval-based approach to further improve the performance of prompt-tuning, which could be a paradigm shift in the task of paraphrase generation or even a broader research area of generation tasks.

Workshop on Scientific Document Understanding

March 1, 2022 @ 10:35-10:45 AM PST
Scientific Chart Summarization: Datasets and Improved Text Modeling
Hao Tan (UNC Chapel Hill), Chen-Tse Tsai, Yujie He (Bloomberg) and Mohit Bansal (UNC Chapel Hill)

Please summarize your research.

Chen-tse: In this research paper, we explore the task of chart summarization, in which the goal is to generate sentences that describe the salient information in a chart image. Below is an example chart image, with a candidate summarization as: The U.S. became the largest provider of albums around 2005.

Charts usually convey the key messages in a multimodal document. Summarization of these charts make them easy to understand and easy to navigate, which is essential in an era where so much information is available. This is especially important when the chart illustrates something that is not conveyed in the text of a document, something that often occurs in a magazine or newspaper, for example.

In order to study this chart summarization problem, we first create a dataset of single-chart images and their captions from research papers in PubMed Central (PMC) and arXiv. The overview of our dataset's creation pipeline is shown in the following figure:

We propose a novel chart summarization model. Besides the standard image captioning component with ResNet and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), our model also employs an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) text representation component to capture both the text embedding and its position. The visual and textual representations are then connected to a large pre-trained language decoder via pre-embedding and cross-attention approaches, respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed model performs significantly better than an image captioning baseline: under semi-supervised setting, our model achieves a BLEU score of 4.47 and a CIDEr score of 10.30, both of which outperform the baselines (BLEU score: 2.20; CIDEr score: 4.49).

Why are these results notable?

Yujie: Charts are usually used to visually summarize important information that a document intends to convey. Summarizing the primary message in a chart is an important step towards understanding a multimodal document. Our proposed scientific chart summarization model opens up the opportunities to 1) extract salient information from charts, 2) enable chart search using natural language, 3) and make charts and figures more accessible to blind or visually-impaired readers.

How does your work advance the state-of-the-art in the field of NLP?

Yujie: The scientific chart dataset, proposed model, and comprehensive analysis will be helpful for future research in scientific document understanding, chart summarization, and multimodal learning.

The post Bloomberg AI Researchers Advance Paraphrase Generation & Chart Summarization in AAAI 2022 Papers appeared first on Tech At Bloomberg.

Bloomberg's EMS offering is a leading solution that offers deep interoperability with the breadth and depth of Bloomberg's other capabilities across the trade lifecycle — including data science and automation.

The TRade, Automation, Analytics and eXecution (TRAAX) Engineering team is responsible for maintaining and evolving Bloomberg’s EMS. First, let’s meet Engineering Manager Alex Bozic, who leads the team.

Tell us about your career path.
After finishing a dual degree (Mathematics and CS) at CUNY, I joined Bloomberg’s Commodity Exchange group, where I was responsible for the software that would send client orders directly to the exchange for execution.

After learning a lot about exchange connectivity and futures trading, I moved to work on the initial version of our Global Sell-Side Equity Order Management System (GSSEOMS), where I was responsible for building out our quote recap and trade monitoring. Developing such a system from scratch was one of the more challenging — and rewarding — parts of my early career.

After finishing the initial version of the system, I found an exciting opportunity with our Risk Analytics system. This eventually grew into my first leadership role. After working a couple of years on a real-time risk engine that processed billions of ticks a day, I was recruited to re-architect Bloomberg’s email platform, known as MSG, to scale to the ever-growing demands of our client base.

Once that transformation was complete, I was asked to come up with a volatility calculation proof of concept (PoC) for our Equity Derivatives business. That was right after the market turmoil in 2008, when volatility had not reached those heights in a generation (or two). After having the PoC grow into one of the 100 most-used applications on the Bloomberg Terminal, I looked for another opportunity and found it with our pre-trade transparency tools, where we used, among other strategies, machine learning models to structure pricing information in the over-the-counter markets.

My role grew until I was responsible for all of Bloomberg’s Fixed Income Pricing products. Over the next couple of years, we added multiple Risk products to this product portfolio.

Finally, I moved to my current role. Eight roles and 21 years later, I am excited about the product I am currently responsible for and eagerly await my next challenge.

What are some of the unique technical challenges your team needs to tackle?
Supporting an enterprise system might not sound unique in the industry, but it is fair to say we do that in the truest sense of the term. Though different people have different definitions for what an enterprise system is, it is generally considered any large-scale system that supports most of the necessary operations for a given business. In other words, if you are using an enterprise system, your business functioning on a day-to-day basis depends on this system being operational. Such systems are designed, built, and marketed to target the needs of entire organizations, as opposed to individual clients. Furthermore, if that system is an enterprise trading system, real capital is on the line at any moment.

Given that, a lot of our technical challenges revolve around how we deliver client value while maintaining reliable, resilient, fault-tolerant, and highly performant real-time trading systems. This is compounded by the feature richness, and therefore complexity and interconnectedness, of the trading system itself, as well as the upstream (e.g., order management and portfolio management) and downstream (e.g., broker, venue, and exchange connectivity) systems. Everything needs to be perfectly orchestrated for the entire system to function properly.

To tackle this, we are constantly moving to a more operationally aware system. The DevOps Handbook and related literature have tremendously influenced our thinking. In addition, the way we model our transactional data is tremendously important, as well as the need for consistent interfaces between the various subsystems.

What's your strategy for choosing team members?
Over the years, I have learned to actively seek out diverse people, opinions, and cultures as a way to learn and grow myself. As noted above, I’ve lived that, serving in eight different roles in six different organizations during my 21 years at Bloomberg. This has been invaluable for my own growth as an engineer, a manager, and a person. As someone once told me, once you gain the perspective of others, it’s very hard to lose it.

Furthermore,  I’ve seen that the best systems that have stood the test of time have been a joint effort of people who are radically different in a variety of ways. There is much research to back that up as well. To me, explicitly seeking out diversity is a win-win for the people that are part of that organization — and the organization itself. People grow faster, and organizations build better products. Easy choice.

Peter Senge, the author of The Fifth Discipline, wrote, “A company’s only sustainable competitive advantage is the ability to learn faster than its competitors.” Learning faster is easier with a diverse group of people.

What skills do you look for when hiring engineers for your teams?
We look for technical people who are collaborative, curious, and have a growth mindset.

As Google’s re:Work research showed, some of the key dynamics to team effectiveness and success are the psychological safety of a team and how it went about learning. Psychological safety starts with building trust with your co-workers, and people who are collaborative and help one another build that trust much faster.

Curious people ask a lot of questions. They do this not only to understand the subject matter more deeply, but also to come up with a better understanding of what the client needs. Given the complexity and interconnectedness of our business and systems, we need this kind of deep understanding to move forward quickly.

Though there are various definitions of what a growth mindset is, the way I’ve seen it manifest itself is in hard work, being thoughtful about your craft, seeking input from others, and not getting caught up in who gets the credit. Someone with this mindset is a terrific person to work with, and the more people like this you have around, the more you and the organization will grow.

What are some of the factors driving the rapid growth of your group?
The primary drivers are the growing demand in automation, pre-trade and post-trade analytics, and the need to scale up the trading system to be able to manipulate thousands of orders at any point in time. But, there is also a push towards consolidation to a single trading system that can handle multiple asset classes. Essentially, this combined system completely re-imagines what our trading system will look like in a couple of years from now.

How do you foster culture on your team? How did that change during the pandemic?
Historically, given our open floor space for everyone, our culture was easy to observe and therefore spread quite organically. More than anything we have a learning culture, where people collaborate a lot, and figure out things with one another, no matter how small.

During the pandemic, we had to rethink things. We looked at what some of the remote-first companies (like GitLab) had done with regards to learning and collaboration and sought to implement what worked best for each team. For example, a couple of teams created great short learning videos that taught specific things about the system (e.g., about the production environment or how some aspect of the build system works). The goal was to mimic the quick conversations that we traditionally had at our desks.

What else would you like to share about your Bloomberg experience?
Last year, one of our Engineering teams formed a group-wide cultural initiative with the intent of educating the team about the cultural diversity that exists within it, with the goal of ultimately helping to shape what the organization’s culture should look like.

The Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) scrum team is made up of volunteers who rotate every quarter or so. They have worked on many D&I initiatives across the company. One example was their work with our hiring team on a gender pronoun “neutralizer” proof of concept, which would automatically replace gender-specific pronouns with neutral ones (like “they”/”them” or “the candidate”) in the candidate feedback forms that are used in our interviewing and hiring processes. Another example was working with the internal team that supports our bug tracking system on promoting simple “thank you’s” throughout the system and aggregating them into an internally public “Thank You” dashboard to recognize those people who are being helpful to others.

"A lot of our technical challenges revolve around how we deliver client value while maintaining reliable, resilient, fault-tolerant, and highly performant real-time trading systems."

– Alex Bozic

Sylvia Hung manages the Execution Management System (EMSX) Workflows group, where she leads five engineering teams that help support workflows for a trading application that executes critical trades that move the financial market around the world. She joined Bloomberg 21 years ago.

What’s your biggest challenge? What inspires you most about your work?
As technology continues to evolve, our biggest challenge is having to decide when to use new technology. I am inspired by the giving spirit found in our company culture. Not only that, we help each other when we work on a project. Every time, when anyone needs help, people offer help without hesitation. People go out of their way to help others and the community.

How do you keep things interesting after so many years at the same company?
Not only have I been in the same company, but I’ve been in the same team. I was able to see how the functionality of the system continues to grow and evolve from when there were just hundreds of clients to today when more than 20,000 clients are trading trillions of dollars each day using our system.

Bloomberg’s technology has continued to change through the years. When I first started, it was just one main task written in Fortran and C. Today, we are working with industry-leading open source technologies such as Apache Cassandra and Apache Kafka, building our services using C++ on Linux, and its front-end uses JavaScript and TypeScript. Recently, we started using React to build our user interfaces.

How does your involvement with Bloomberg’s D&I Communities impact your life? What are some of the activities you’re involved with?
I worked with a couple of female leaders and created a local group called Women in TRAAX, ETN and QA (WiTEQ). It is easier for a woman to talk to other women, and having our community helps us share and discuss the challenges we face every day. We worked on bringing tech talks to the group and creating mentorship sessions to provide opportunities for participants to interact with senior leaders and help them grow. I also do one-to-one mentorship to encourage, guide, and develop future leaders. Serving as a mentor also helps me grow.

How do you inspire teams to innovate? What are some examples of recent innovations?
Never stop dreaming. When you see a problem, you have a great opportunity to improve the situation. Four years ago, my team had to migrate all of the actions for EMSX, Bloomberg’s equity EMS. I dreamed out loud and said, “If the code can write itself and we only focus on the difficult pieces, that will be great.” During one of our internal hackathons, one of my team members decided to create a code generator. In the end, my team adopted the code generator and we were able to surprise our business and deliver against an extremely tight deadline.

Another example is that we had accumulated a lot of JavaScript code and decided to switch to TypeScript, but we had a lot of code to convert. One of my team members decided to introduce us to an open source tool called codemod that was able to help us speed up the conversion process.

What else would you like to share about your Bloomberg experience?
Fortunately, I was selected by my manager to participate in the company’s Growth, Opportunities, Access and Leadership (GOAL) 2.0 Program, which is designed to accelerate the growth potential of high-performing women and ethnically diverse employees. As part of this initiative, I was paired with a mentor and sponsor, which helped me grow my network with other women leaders across the company. As part of the program, I am regularly being provided tools to help me understand how to achieve my next career goal. I was recently promoted to Manager from Team Lead.

"It is easier for a woman to talk to other women, and having our community helps us share and discuss the challenges we face every day."

– Sylvia Hung

Karan Mehra, a senior software engineer in the TRAAX department, has been at Bloomberg for 11 years. He is a full-stack engineer and is heavily involved in D&I initiatives and the “Champ Board,” a group of engineers that run the “Champs and Reps” program, which gives engineers the opportunity to be technical leaders and have an impact beyond just their own team.

Tell us about what you're working on now and what your biggest challenge is. What inspires you most about it?
On the Engineering front, I'm currently working on a project to add more automation to continue enhancing our Equity Trading solution (EMSX). The idea is to figure out how we can identify bugs before they reach clients via better UI automation testing, as well as how we can use automation to respond to and troubleshoot bugs when they inevitably do sneak into our code.

As an active contributor to Bloomberg’s D&I initiatives, I'm part of a small group of engineers running a mentorship program for other TRAAX engineers. Based on studies, mentorship is disproportionately beneficial to folks from underrepresented communities, so that was our motivation. However, we haven't restricted participation to any one group, because diversity and inclusion go hand-in-hand, and we don't want to exclude anyone.

On the Champs (and also D&I) front, I'm part of a working group that is reviewing the state of both diversity and inclusion in our cross-Engineering technical communities. Given our unique "no roles" organizational structure at Bloomberg, these technical communities are crucial to technical leadership at an Individual Contributor (IC) level. So, we want to make sure we don't have blind spots when it comes to making these opportunities equally accessible to all engineers.

How do you keep things interesting after so many years at the same company?
When I attended the Bloomberg Info Session at Georgia Tech’s Career Fair in 2010, I heard one of the Bloomberg engineers at the booth remark,  "I'm so excited to work here after all these years because there is never a day you don't learn something new!" I initially rolled my eyes and dismissed it, but I still hung around for the free pizza. Today, I'm that guy (after 11 years at the same company, I'm basically a dinosaur when it comes to my generation), and it turns out that they weren't just parroting the company sales pitch. You really do learn something new every day here at Bloomberg.

When it comes to technology, our Engineering department solves problems in just about every area of Computer Science, all the way from low-level database query optimization to the use of high-level artificial intelligence to predict trends. Even within a single team, you get to solve so many of those problems, so there's literally never a dull day. You also learn that there's so much to learn as an engineer beyond machines, and that you wish Computer Science degrees came with mandatory courses in communication, negotiation, psychology, etc. Machines are almost simpler in that regard.

The second, and arguably bigger, reason I'm here, is the people. We are not only encouraged, but also incentivized to spend time in our day job volunteering towards philanthropic efforts. I was blown away when I learned that the vast majority of our net profits go to philanthropy. I also care deeply about D&I, which I get to work on with the full support of my managers, all the way up to Alex.

You’re very involved in a variety of D&I initiatives. Tell us about why this is important to you and some of the things you’ve played a role in to make our workplace more inclusive.
It is important to me because I have always been treated well. It wasn’t until halfway through my career that I naively believed that that was how every other engineer was treated — regardless of gender, origin, sexuality, or any other human facet. I remember how cheated (and initially, in denial) I felt when I started to learn that tech was not the meritocracy a lot of us grew up believing it was. How could it not be!? You write good code, you move ahead. What makes this especially difficult for people like me to see — a brown, middle-class immigrant man from India that has been treated as an equal in America — is the "brown" + "middle-class" + "Indian immigrant" part. If someone like me is being treated as an equal, surely everyone else is, right?

What I didn’t realize was that the “man” part of that description held such a disproportionately beneficial weight. I have had women managers for most of my career (including Sylvia). Plus, in my hometown in India, girls consistently out-ranked the boys in high school and above. So I just always assumed that there were way fewer women in tech mainly because they didn’t want to be there, not because of a lack of ability. The third option never even occurred to me: that they were both willing and able, but there were other factors at play.

Once I learned about the systemic and cultural obstacles that women engineers face in tech, I wanted to help. The first meaningful D&I initiative I got involved in was to co-lead the "B-Techies" program. This collaboration between Bloomberg Philanthropies and Bloomberg Women in Tech (BWIT) created an after-school program to get more middle-school girls from underprivileged backgrounds interested in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM), through fun activities like building "earthquake" (jello) resistant towers out of straws, making light-up holiday cards by creating electrical circuits, and more. I think my desire to do this comes from my family, where my parents, grandparents, and others have always played a very active role in promoting education for girls. Soon after B-Techies, I had the opportunity to kick off a BWIT Allyship Initiative, which is probably the thing that's been closest to my heart during my career here. I'm also involved in running the aforementioned TRAAX Mentorship Program and the D&I Working Group for our technical communities.

How does the collaborative environment at Bloomberg create opportunities to learn new skills and expand your expertise?
My high school and undergrad experiences were probably not the healthiest growth environments, based on the systems, people, and culture around me. I always felt that asking a question made me look like a fool. So I didn't ask too many except when I was around family, and I often pretended I knew the answers.

Working within the collaborative environment at Bloomberg broke my years-long insecurity very quickly. I found that it wasn't only okay to say, "I don't understand that,” but also was encouraged to do so. That is also the one piece of advice I give every candidate I interview when they ask what would make them a successful Bloomberg Engineer. I tell them to "ask all the questions you can think of because that will make us all better." We often need fresh eyes to question decades of assumptions in our software and our culture. A simple "why" is just enough to help us make groundbreaking changes.

"When it comes to technology, our Engineering department solves problems in just about every area of Computer Science, all the way from low-level database query optimization to the use of high-level artificial intelligence to predict trends."

– Karan Mehra

Krishna Achari is a senior software engineer who has been with Bloomberg for 10 years. Her team provides a single platform to trade simple or complex futures strategies, as well as contingent/algorithmic strategies in global futures exchanges. This platform, called Tradebook, provides access to 30 futures exchanges through over 50 exchange member partners.

Tell us about what you're working on now and what your biggest challenge is. What inspires you most about it?
I am currently working on new algorithmic strategies for one of our biggest clients. Making an impact in this industry and in customers’ lives is motivating. It is important to be a part of something that is big and important to Bloomberg and makes a difference in our clients' experience. My contribution provides me with a sense of ownership in both my own work and my overall work environment.

How do you keep things interesting after so many years at the same company?
It is hard to believe that I celebrated my 10-year anniversary at Bloomberg earlier this year, after previously working for three different companies in six years before coming here. Bloomberg and my team have always helped me grow professionally, take up new challenges, and learn new technologies. I look forward to new projects that encourage me to learn new skills. I learn, contribute, and make a positive impact on my career, Bloomberg, and our clients; the job is always exhilarating.

How have you been able to manage your career at one company for more than a decade? What advice do you have for others who might be on a similar path?
Bloomberg has offered me fantastic professional growth and leadership opportunities, training programs, and mentoring. Work-life balance policies, great workplaces, and employee wellness programs really help in the long run. The Tradebook team gave me opportunities to work closely with clients and be part of the whole journey from defining a problem to delivering a solution. I stay curious and the daily job is what drives me. I worked in Tradebook for more than 10 years and every day is still challenging and gratifying. When and if I choose to explore different challenges outside my team, Bloomberg offers great opportunities internally.

How do you foster a collaborative, inclusive environment at work?
In any organization, the way information is handled determines whether it becomes an obstacle to or an enabler of collaboration. Bloomberg enables and rewards transparent communication company-wide. It is a vitally important tool for our team in championing collaboration.

Diverse views are most likely a company’s most important asset and Bloomberg, with its flat organization allows all team members to contribute. Consistent company-wide goals help various teams create a single vision, collaborate, and work towards it.

Anything else you would like to share about your Bloomberg experience?
Bloomberg’s philanthropic efforts give me great pride. I volunteered for a few of our corporate philanthropy programs. Working at Bloomberg exposes you to loads of opportunities and activities from being part of half marathons and being part of the rehearsal for The Umbrella Project by Cirque Bijou during Lumiere London to planting trees, just to name a few of them. It gives me great joy to be part of those programs and make a real difference.

"It is important to be a part of something that is big and important to Bloomberg and makes a difference in our clients' experience. My contribution provides me with a sense of ownership in both my own work and my overall work environment."

– Krishna Achari

Hannah Case is a senior software engineer on the FI/FX EMS team, where she builds trading applications for fixed income and foreign exchange instruments. She started her Bloomberg career in London nine years ago and moved into her current role in New York three years ago.

Tell us about what you're working on now and what your biggest challenge is. What inspires you most about it?
I’m running a project to re-write FXEM, our EMS for FX trading, to use a new technology stack. The idea is to unite the various trading systems at Bloomberg, thereby reducing code duplication and giving our users a more uniform experience.

It’s challenging because these trading systems have grown over many years from different corners of the company. We need to find creative ways to consume data from systems with different behaviors and publish them in exactly the same way. From the user experience side, we work closely with our product managers to find compromises between the different workflows.

I find it exciting because I’ve seen the transformation this approach can facilitate. Before it existed, I was on the opposite side, consuming order data to enrich my application. It was a long and cumbersome process that we had to repeat for each individual trading system. One person had an idea of how we could create a common data model with common interfaces, and that idea birthed a team that is now powering some of the most important applications at Bloomberg.

How have you been able to manage your career at one company for more than a decade? What advice do you have for others who might be on a similar path?
I would share the same advice my manager once gave me, which is to go towards opportunities rather than shying away from them because you don’t know what they may lead to. Early in my career in London, I had just started interviewing university candidates and I was terrified of it (it can be scary from our side too, you know). I told my manager that I wanted to give it up. Knowing what kind of opportunity I would be throwing away, he encouraged me to think about why I was afraid of it and try to address that instead.

One opportunity led to another, and I ended up traveling all across Europe interviewing students at careers fairs and running events at Women in STEM conferences. It helped expand my network and visibility across the company.

Opportunities can come in many forms. A friend of mine was really interested in Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), and they started contributing changes to one of Bloomberg’s CI/CD frameworks. He was asked if he wanted to spend a few months with a CI/CD team. As a result, he has helped improve software development workflows across the entire company and is now a “Champ” — a specific role for technical leaders at Bloomberg.

How do you foster a collaborative, inclusive environment at work?
I once worked in a project team of just three people, where we all knew the entire codebase as well as one another. This meant we could plan out changes as a group, brainstorm together when anyone was stuck, and we could quickly adapt if the project changed direction. It was probably the most efficient project I’ve ever worked on – and the most fun! This is the style of collaboration I’m always striving for.

I’m now working on a much bigger project across multiple teams, but we still innersource work across teams. Not only does this allow us to go to where the work is needed, but also it gives us a much better understanding of each other’s systems. We also have regular design discussions with the entire team, starting with a presentation for those less familiar with the code, as well as brainstorming sessions with smaller groups to give everyone an opportunity to speak up. This approach will sometimes reinforce an idea I already had, while other times it will take me in a completely different direction of which I had never thought.

What else would you like to share about your Bloomberg experience?
What I never expected when joining Bloomberg nine years ago was the sheer variety of things I’d get involved with outside of my main role as a software engineer. Through philanthropy, I’ve taught programming classes to children at local schools. I’ve written questions for coding competitions and tested puzzles for intern events. I’ve spoken on panels about my career and given tech talks at universities. I’ve attended loads of amazing events at the Women of the World Festival in London, of which I’m really proud to say Bloomberg is the main sponsor. When I told my manager that I wanted to move from London to New York, I got a huge amount of support with the immigration process, finding a new team, finding an apartment, and so on. All these are just a bonus on top of the really interesting and challenging projects in my day-to-day work.

"I would share the same advice my manager once gave me, which is to go towards opportunities rather than shying away from them because you don’t know what they may lead to."

– Hannah Case

Check out some of the open roles with our TRade, Automation, Analytics and eXecution Engineering team:

Senior Software Engineer - Trade Automation & Execution (New York)

Senior TypeScript Software Engineer - Trade Automation & Execution (New York)

Senior TypeScript Software Engineer - Cross Asset Trading System (CATS) (London)

Senior Software Engineer - Trade Automation and Execution (London)

Senior Software Engineer - Trading Automation (Frankfurt)

The post Meet the Team: TRade, Automation, Analytics and eXecution Engineering appeared first on Tech At Bloomberg.

One study found that women and people from underrepresented groups are more likely to say that mentoring was an important aspect of their career progression. But, for it to be successful in helping with career advancement, research indicates that mentorship must be more than simply instructional; a mentor must play the dual role of coach and counselor. And, even though there are obvious benefits for the mentee, there may also be benefits for the mentor.

Companies must understand how to effectively establish mentorship programs when trying to recruit and retain talent. It is also important for employees from underrepresented backgrounds to understand how to effectively and strategically seek out and engage with their mentors.

Numerous mentorship programs have been implemented across Bloomberg to help accelerate the growth potential of high-performing employees from different backgrounds. This includes targeted mentorship programs that pair Black employees with managers for career development opportunities.

One of these efforts, the Bloomberg Black in Tech Mentorship Program, was launched for the first time early last in 2021, with 15 pairs of mentors/mentees. The goals of this tailored mentorship program were to provide members of the Bloomberg Black in Tech (BBIT) group from around the globe with the opportunity to broaden their networks, increase their visibility, retain and engage talent, foster career development (for both mentors and mentees), and continue creating an inclusive and diverse culture within Engineering.

We spoke to two mentor/mentees pairs to learn how the BBIT Mentorship Program helped them grow professionally: Akin Mousse (San Francisco) and Akshit Kumar (New York), and Meshach Jones (New York) and Peter Baxter (London).
Tell us about your role & how long you've been at Bloomberg.

Akin: I joined Bloomberg in London almost nine years ago as part of the Desktop Build Group (DBG). I had the opportunity to move to San Francisco in 2015 and transitioned into a software engineer role two years ago by joining the BQuant Financial Libraries (FinLibs) team. My main focus is to create user-facing APIs that our clients can use with the BQuant platform to help facilitate their investment decisions.

Akshit: Bloomberg was my first job after school, and I have been working here for more than 18 years. In my current role as Engineering Manager for Currency & Commodities Trading Applications (FXGO & CMET), I get to not only work and learn from my team members, but also to collaborate with the wider Engineering organization and our Product & Sales counterparts.

Meshach: I joined Bloomberg around four and a half years ago, straight from university. Since joining the company, I’ve worked on several teams in AIM’s compliance area. I’ve focused on a range of projects from search improvement to re-designing how we generate our market value calculations.

Peter: I’m in a leadership role in Markets, Community & AI (MCA), responsible for Worksheets and Dynamic List. I’ve been at Bloomberg for 15 years and have spent time in a number of different roles, mainly in MCA, where I’ve been a TL for three teams.

Why were you interested in volunteering to participate in this mentorship program?

Akin: I decided to join BBIT after transferring from the Desktop Build Group to the BQuant Engineering team. My main goal was to find people who looked like me and were part of the Engineering department. I was looking for a community I could leverage while making this transition. When BBIT offered a mentorship program in early 2021, I quickly volunteered to take part as a mentee, as I saw it as a career and personal growth opportunity.

Akshit: For me, there were two specific reasons I decided to take part as a mentor.

First, through every stage of my career, various people had unofficially mentored me. They not only honed my analytical and decision-making skills, but also opened their networks to me. Having spent the time I have at Bloomberg, I felt that it was time to do my best to pass on the lessons I had learned about leadership.

Second, and just as important, I expected it to be a great learning experience for me. In the past, I have mentored individuals who were up for a career progression. However, I felt that the BBIT Mentorship Program would help me learn how to be a better mentor and more inclusive leader, as I would be getting the opportunity to learn with Akin, who is at a different point in his career.

Meshach: I was interested in joining the BBIT Mentorship Program, as it would allow me to advance my career progression. Having a mentor who was allied with a group I was deeply ingrained with provided me with a base level of comfort. This was a critical element since both parties have to be trusting and willing to be vulnerable with one another for mentorship to work successfully. I also wanted to participate in the program to help grow connections from BBIT to the wider Bloomberg organization.

Peter: Mentoring is a large part of leadership, and it’s one of the main reasons why I enjoy being a leader. I really like discussing the different challenges that people face and the different ways we can solve problems. I particularly enjoy talking about leadership and how to build a team. Mentoring new people with different backgrounds from other areas of the company also gives me exposure to the variety of different challenges that people face. Learning about the experience of others will hopefully make me a better leader.

As a mentor, what did you learn from your relationship with your mentee that surprised you?

Akshit: Quite a lot. Akin and I were quickly able to establish trust between us. In our first session, we shared our personal life journeys and were surprised how many things we had in common.

We then started our journey in a truly agile fashion. Every time we met, we spent time reviewing the key impressions Akin had taken from our prior discussion. As you can imagine, this was eye-opening. I could clearly see examples of where innocuous confirmation bias may have seeped into my viewpoint about some topics. It truly became a two-way learning experience.

Peter: I’ve been here a long time, so it takes a lot to surprise me! It was interesting to learn about the leadership structure in Meshach’s area, and the particular challenges he has faced with regards to career development. We also spent time discussing how he could be more proactive in conversations about his career. One thing I’ve learnt from working with lots of people is that, even though everyone's career journey is unique, there are definitely a lot of experiences worth sharing

As a mentee, have you seen a positive impact on your career since joining the program?

Akin: My relationship with Akshit has not only had a positive impact on my career, but also my personal life. In our recurring conversations, Akshit helped me to see things differently. Our discussions helped me grow and be more proactive about establishing, tracking, and assessing my career and life goals. Even though the mentorship program has ended, Akshit and I still meet regularly. Having an ongoing opportunity to talk with him, exchange ideas, and get advice is something that I truly value and appreciate.

Meshach: Since having Peter as a mentor, I have seen a greatly positive impact on my career. I've defined what I want for my career in the near term and have started taking tangible steps towards those goals. While it's impossible to say what my progression would have been without this mentorship, I know that Peter’s mentorship has been critical to helping ensure I’m actively monitoring and guiding my career.

What has been the greatest highlight of your mentor/mentee relationship?

Akin: Early on in our conversations, Akshit encouraged me to expand my thought process or my vision on things. He encouraged me to not limit myself to technical and finance focus reads, but to have a more diverse collection of books, like the autobiography of Frederick Douglass or “Atomic Habits”. I now realize how our conversations influenced me to constantly try to improve myself.

Akshit: The greatest highlight for me is the relationship I have been able to build with Akin and the things I have learned through this relationship. It has pushed me to get more involved in similar programs throughout the firm. Akin and I were able to create a valuable two-way dialogue. His feedback on topics such as personal leadership and initiative made me appreciate how different individuals face unique hurdles during their professional journeys. It actually changed me and I now push to get personal feedback on a regular basis from team members in different roles within my organization. Their insights help me learn more about how we can take action to create a much more inclusive culture.

Meshach: The highlight of my mentorship experience with Peter was defining what my goals were and why. Before sitting down with my mentor I had loose goals for my career progression and was selling my ambitions short due to what I believed was the need to wait for the proper timing. In addition to timing, I also had thoughts about particular actions that should be taken, but didn’t really think deeply about how they played into what I wanted for my career. Peter helped break this thought pattern and helped me better solidify what I wanted to do and the actions I should take to get there.

Peter: Working with Meshach was a really nice experience. He was keen to learn, and he put into practice some of the things we spoke about. Hearing about the development steps he took between our meetings was always a highlight for me.

Why would you recommend this program to others?

Akin: Definitely! Mentoring should be an essential part of everyone’s career development. This program helped me tremendously during a focal point of my career. Unfortunately, earlier in my career, there was no program like this. So, regardless of where you are in your career journey, I highly recommend you take part in it.

Akshit: As a mentor, if you go into this or a similar program with humility, you will undoubtedly become a more insightful and inclusive leader. Just do it.

For mentees, we all need advice and perspective from multiple people during our careers. I recommend joining a program like this simply to get a different perspective on various topics that are important to you. A good mentor can ignite your mind to the world of possibilities that you can experience at Bloomberg.

Meshach: Yes! Mentorship is a great way to connect to new individuals, see things from new perspectives, and gain new insights. Whether you’re a mentee or mentor, it’s always a valuable experience. There are key skills to gain and build upon during your career journey and mentorship programs are an excellent way to do so. Even if you think you’re not interested in leadership or developing others, these are key skills in work environments.

Peter: There isn’t really much to lose from being a mentor or mentee. You’re likely to build a friendly relationship with someone you may not know, and you’ll almost certainly learn some new skills or get an insightful view on the challenges you face. And you’ll probably end up enjoying the process too.

Why is it important to have a mentorship program at Bloomberg for Black technology professionals?

Akin: This program is crucial as it offers technology professionals from an underrepresented group exposure to Bloomberg leadership. I hope that through similar programs, Bloomberg can identify and prepare the company’s future leaders. We need to improve the number of Black professionals in our Engineering teams and leadership positions. And I know that increasing the representation and retention of black talent is a goal for Bloomberg.

Akshit: There is an under-representation of Black professionals in the technology sector. And in such a scenario, it is hard for a Black professional in tech to feel included. I truly believe all people at Bloomberg want to keep enhancing the inclusiveness of our work culture. But many people struggle with where to start and how to contribute. That is exactly what this mentorship program aims to do. For me, it was a start.

Meshach: Given the many challenges Black engineers face, I think the BBIT Mentorship Program is important within the Black engineering community. We love it when we have diverse talent within the organization, but without the proper mentorship that some candidates may have never experienced, we can set individuals up for failure. It’s not enough to just improve our diversity numbers. At the end of the day, these are people who have ambitions and goals, and we need to ensure we’re supporting and helping them thrive toward achieving their goals.

Peter: There really isn’t room here to express all the reasons why these kinds of programs are important. In addition to echoing what Meshach shared about leveling the playing field and making sure we set individuals up to succeed, I’ll add some thoughts on how mentoring can have an impact at a higher level.

As a leader, one of the main things I aim to create is an inclusive environment where people from different backgrounds can thrive. Over the years, I’ve learned that people from underrepresented groups look for diverse leadership of the teams and groups they may consider joining. They want to see people like themselves who have been successful. If mentorship helps people from underrepresented groups move into leadership positions, then it will have a positive impact on our overall diversity going forward.Learn more about Bloomberg's ongoing commitment and efforts to hire, retain, develop, and accelerate underrepresented talent.

The post How mentorship levels the playing field for Bloomberg’s Black technologists appeared first on Tech At Bloomberg.

Today’s modern consumer enjoys unprecedented convenience, with same-day deliveries and one-click shopping. Digital experiences are at our fingertips, streamed by the terabyte. The whole world arrives at our doorstep or is piped into our devices so seamlessly that, at times, it truly feels as though we’re living in a sci-fi future.

But eventually, you have to leave the comfort of your home and get on a plane or renew your driver’s license, and you remember just how clunky modern life can be. There are delays and hiccups that prevent you from doing what you want to do and going where you want to go. A lot of that friction results from the cumbersome requirements of pulling card-after-card from your wallet to prove that you are, without a doubt, you.

In today’s COVID-19 world, organizations of all shapes and sizes must now confirm not only your identity, but also information about your vaccine status, proof of a negative COVID-19 test, or other important public health information. However, performing this kind of identity verification at scale, without compromising your privacy, is no simple task.

CLEAR is one company that’s taken on this challenge. With a market cap of more than $6 billion, CLEAR was the travel industry’s biggest IPO last year. The company’s mission is to make travel and other experiences frictionless, safe, and secure through its biometric identification platform. Using the biometric indicators you already carry on your person at all times, CLEAR is able to help verify your identity without a bunch of cumbersome forms of identification or documentation.

CLEAR CEO, Co-Founder, and Chairman Caryn Seidman-Becker joined Scarlet Fu, Bloomberg Television and Bloomberg QuickTake host, for an online conversation on Friday, January 28, 2022, as part of the Cornell Tech @ Bloomberg Speaker Series. She shared the story of how she and her co-founder resurrected CLEAR, transforming it into one of the biggest players in the identity space.From auction to IPO

Verified Identity Pass, the company now known as CLEAR, was founded by Steven Brill in 2003 in an attempt to shorten the historically long lines at airports after the September 11th terrorist attacks.

The company attracted an enthusiastic user base over the next five years. But, in 2008, Verified Identity Pass declared bankruptcy and ceased operations the following year.

However, that wasn’t the end of CLEAR’s story.

Investor Seidman-Becker’s journey with CLEAR began the following year when she and co-founder Ken Cornick bought Verified Identity Pass at a bankruptcy sale and subsequently relaunched it. Seidman-Becker had a vision to roll out biometrics at a scale the U.S. had not yet seen.

In buying Verified Identity Pass, Seidman-Becker acquired some hardware and existing profiles of 190,000 prior members. But perhaps most importantly, they acquired a strong brand that customers genuinely appreciated. The challenge was to build a new company around that goodwill.

Beyond travel

Think about all the times you have to pull your driver’s license — or now, your vaccination card — out of your wallet. It seems that anywhere groups of people gather, there will be a need to verify some form of ID.

As Caryn and Ken started to rebuild the CLEAR platform from the ground up - they communicated a pledge to all the grandfathered members that the company would do right by them. CLEAR now operates out of more than 40 airports, 26 sports and entertainment venues, and boasts over 55 million verifications across 5 million members.

CLEAR’s early investors included Delta Air Lines and United Airlines. These relationships helped CLEAR better integrate with the airlines’ various verification points, from check-in to boarding to airport lounges. They’ve also partnered with Uber to help travelers optimize their journey to the airport to catch their flight, and will soon partner with the TSA to bring pre-check services to flyers. In late 2021, CLEAR made its first acquisition - purchasing Argentinian virtual queuing company Whyline.

But CLEAR doesn’t want to only provide amazing travel experiences — they want to make your whole life seamless. The company launched its Health Pass in March of 2021. This platform gives event attendees and employees a way to seamlessly submit their vaccination status, proof of a negative COVID-19 test, or other health-related information. CLEAR’s Health Pass is just one more step in its mission to unlock your biometric data as your universal ID.

Protecting privacy in a frictionless world

There are a lot of ways that this scale of biometric data collection and transmission can go wrong, but “protecting our members' privacy is job one at CLEAR,” says Seidman-Becker. “We are obsessed with our member experience. When a customer has a bad experience, they can email me directly. We put our emails out there. I’ll get back to them myself — or our member services team will — quickly. That could be Saturday at 2:00 PM when I'm at my son's soccer game.”

CLEAR pledges not to rent or sell or share your data — you remain in control of your information and can delete it at any time. Seidman-Becker emphasizes the company’s commitment to privacy and the importance of communicating its privacy policies in clear human language.

“It takes a really long time to build a track record, and that can be very easily destroyed,” says Seidman-Becker. “And so, it's a day-by-day action — words are cheap. It's the actions that you take. It's the partners that you partner with and the consistency, and then it's driving that culture throughout the organization.”

The vision

Seidman-Becker envisions a world where a rideshare service picks you up because it knows you and the driver is already vaccinated or recently tested negative. Your favorite coffee is delivered just as you arrive at your desk. Later that day, you have a telehealth appointment with your doctor where sensitive medical information is discussed. After work, you enter a stadium with no queue to watch a sporting event, and your beer is served to you at your seat without needing to confirm that you’re of age, fumble to find a card to prove your age, or hand over cash. At every step of the way, CLEAR is used — sometimes without you even realizing it — to skip past the drudgery of life — waiting in lines, pulling out ID cards, typing in passwords, and signing forms.

“That really is frictionless and delightful in person,” she says. “You get your time back and spend it instead with your family, doing what you love doing.”You can watch the entire discussion below:

The post How Caryn Seidman-Becker built CLEAR into a $4.5 billion IPO (Cornell Tech @ Bloomberg) appeared first on Tech At Bloomberg.

First, let’s meet Niraj Juthani, Manager of the Enterprise Technology Engineering group.

What are some of the unique technical challenges your team needs to tackle?
Our clients are technologists at financial institutions. They use our APIs and data and integrate with the systems they build and manage. It is very important to understand their SLAs, their workflows, and their development experience. This allows us to offer features that are conducive and easy to adopt.

At the same time, we depend on a wide variety of business groups at Bloomberg for the data they generate. We need to be able to work with them and understand many different aspects of markets and data around them. Handling data at scale while maintaining its consistency is generally a common challenge.

Briefly tell us about your career path.
I have been at Bloomberg for about 16 years. I started as an intern. I spent most of my career in News Engineering, performing many different roles. I was fortunate enough to be able to help grow the Bloomberg AI team alongside the News Engineering team. I recently moved into my current role.

After 16 years, I thought I had done many things and seen it all. But I was so wrong. This new role opened up a world that I knew existed, but never understood how different and exciting it would be. That's the beauty of being at Bloomberg. We have all kinds of challenges and all kinds of products one can imagine.

What's your strategy for choosing team members?
We believe in the right attitude. We want people to come in and invest themselves in what we do, own, and care about it. We look for those qualities in candidates. Core skills and domain knowledge can be improved. We are vigilant about our biases and therefore seek diverse opinions before making decisions.

What skills do you look for when hiring engineers for your teams?
As far as core skills are concerned, we have many roles with a wide variety of technology requirements. We have traditional roles which require working with C++ and Python to more modern web technologies like React, REST APIs, and GraphQL.

What are some of the factors driving the rapid growth of your group?
Our group supports enterprise businesses at Bloomberg with Enterprise Data and our Integration and Connectivity platforms. These businesses have been growing rapidly over the last few years. As the entire finance industry shifts towards data-driven decisions and focuses on improving the efficiency of operations, there is great demand for the solutions we provide. The rapid growth of this business is driving the expansion of our team.

How do you foster culture on your team? How has that changed with people working from home during the pandemic?
We depend on a highly collaborative environment. As I mentioned before, our teams work with many different groups across Bloomberg. Our success depends on how well we can build relationships, understand and define common goals, and work together. With work from home during the pandemic, we relied heavily on our pre-existing relationships and focused on innovative ways to cultivate new ones. However, with the onset of our department’s hybrid work environment, this has become a bit easier. There are enough touchpoints now to take advantage of in-person settings in the office, but still enough flexibility to work from home when one needs to. At the end of the day, it is important to foster a cordial and respectful culture where we trust each other and listen to each other to achieve success.

"We depend on a wide variety of business groups at Bloomberg for the data they generate. We need to be able to work with them and understand many different aspects of markets and data around them."

– Niraj Juthani

Vince Mannino is a manager in Enterprise Real-time Engineering, where he is responsible for the Enterprise Entitlement and Product Oversight workflow teams. He’s working on modernizing the back-end with cutting-edge technologies and proven best practices, among other projects.

What’s the biggest challenge in your current work?
It’s definitely seamlessly upgrading the tech stack in a critical production system. It means that we have to be clever about how we transition between systems, especially with the massive amount of state and scale involved. It’s great to see how excited the team is about the potential that our new architecture unlocks. And we are already seeing the benefits in our developer experience and system stability.

What is it like moving to different teams within Bloomberg? How have you adapted?
I’ve had the opportunity to work and grow on several teams in Enterprise Technology during my four years here. What’s it like? It’s both easy and hard. It’s easy because Bloomberg always put my career first and fostered an environment where I could try new things. It’s also been challenging to go outside my comfort zone and take on new technologies and domains. Coming from a traditional C++/Java background to the Enterprise Analytics team, I still remember how mind-blowing functional programming was. However, I think that challenge is the objective. Adaptation leads to personal and professional growth, and mobility is a great way to welcome adaptation.

The best advice I was given was to embrace my position as a newcomer and not shy away from asking questions. It’s not only critical for managing the learning curve, but it’s also a key part of our culture of innovation. I can’t tell you how many times an outside perspective has helped me revisit our status quo.

How do you foster a collaborative, inclusive environment at work?
Building an atmosphere where everyone feels comfortable is critically important. When we can put forth our unique ideas and perspectives without fear of how they will be perceived, we do our best work. We innovate more too. In my view, that means maintaining a lighthearted attitude on the team. Our environment is high stakes, but we still have a lot of fun. Moreover, we strive to welcome a diverse set of opinions and strongly encourage the notion of “20% ideas.”

What are your best tips for inspiring direct reports?
I believe a lot of inspiration is bred from a place of ownership and passion. When we feel like a system is truly ours and we can see the impact of our changes, it’s easy to obsess about pushing the envelope. I still remember my first professional project. I was so passionate about perfecting it. I'd stir awake from a dream and jot newly formed feature ideas down.

We also feed off each others’ passion, especially our leaders. I like to emphasize what gets me excited — whether it’s the diversity of our technology, the scale of our products, or the company’s broad impact (including our commitment to philanthropy).

I also feel it's important to encourage appropriate risk-taking. The team needs to be empowered to challenge the status quo, to try new things, and to fail fast. We find that a proof of concept (PoC) is an excellent way to actuate this. Bloomberg wouldn’t be here without taking the right risks.

"Bloomberg always put my career first and fostered an environment where I could try new things."

– Vince Mannino

Samriddhi Sharma is the Team Lead for the Data Acquisitions Solutions team, which works on an API integration layer that allows key financial clients, such as big banks and hedge funds, to acquire their financial transactions from Bloomberg.

What’s the biggest challenge in your current work?
My main focus is to ensure that clients have a consistent, high-quality experience with the API. This goal drives our recent initiative to build a next-generation, scalable, and resilient product with proactive and dynamic client alerting and monitoring. The opportunity to create a roadmap and product vision that measurably improves our client experience is an exciting challenge that really drives the work I do.

What do you wish you knew about software engineering careers before you joined Bloomberg? What’s your best advice for inspiring new college grads who have recently joined Bloomberg?
In college or during internships, software engineering is often about building a proof of concept without having to worry about how the product will function in production or how it will be supported across an organization with multiple stakeholders. However, at Bloomberg, you really learn how to engineer production-ready and supportable products by solving some very complex, unique, and interesting problems.

For any new grad joining a job out of college, the best advice I can give is to start becoming comfortable with uncertainty. While your team lead will absolutely support you by providing mentorship and guidance, you’ll grow fastest if you can see uncertainty and ambiguity as an opportunity to take ownership of, and learn from, real-life problems. The uncertainty can come in multiple forms: which design pattern to implement, what technology to use, etc. Of course, you always need check-ins on your progress as you develop and grow professionally through regular feedback from your mentors.

You’re very involved in a variety of D&I initiatives. Tell us about why this is important to you and some of the things you’ve played a role in to make our workplace more inclusive.
Bloomberg does a great job at retaining its diverse employees specifically because it really invests in building an inclusive community and supporting their career growth and aspirations. As the Chair of Women in Enterprise Solutions (WES), I see my role as two-fold: building community amongst the group, and supporting members’ career aspirations by facilitating mentorship, networking, and access to the right resources. Over the past year, we’ve held mentorship speed rounds; hosted a moderated Q&A with Vlad Kliatchko, Global Head of Engineering; and organized volunteer group outings.

How do you inspire teams to innovate? What are some examples of recent innovations?
I believe innovation is a mindset that you can model and apply to your everyday work, as well as to strategic initiatives. I really encourage my team to utilize company-wide initiatives and business projects as opportunities to innovate on our current technology stack. Business and engineering initiatives don’t have to be mutually exclusive or competing interests. To that end, we have innovated on our CI/CD pipeline to collect code quality metrics (linting) and utilize these for merging new code; improved system reliability by adding support for dynamic autoscaling; and improved client and engineering monitoring experiences by adding proactive alerts to detect client issues.

"At Bloomberg, you really learn how to engineer production-ready and supportable products by solving some very complex, unique, and interesting problems."

– Samriddhi Sharma

Richard Norton has spent 15 years at Bloomberg in a variety of roles and is currently Engineering Manager of the Data License (DL) team. The Data License platform creates a marketplace of content for Bloomberg’s clients, allowing them to access Reference, Pricing, and Regulatory Data for use in their own accounting, portfolio management, and compliance systems.

What’s the biggest challenge in your current work?
In order to maintain their edge in financial decision-making, our clients have a huge appetite for a broader range and depth of financial and alternative data. This needs to be combined with the benefits of agility from building software native to the Public Cloud. Our team has been working hard to make Data License content easily discoverable and seamlessly available in the Cloud. If they want to use our data on over 50 million securities, it’s instantly available at a click of a button for them to use in their machine learning or back-office application. This is incredibly exciting. Plus, we are fanatics about data. We care about how data is structured, its metadata, and its relationships.

How do you keep things interesting after so many years at the same company?
I’ve been fortunate to get involved across different areas of the business during my time at Bloomberg. Each role feels new, while also enabling me to leverage everything I have done so far. This includes working in different regions across New York and London, as well as different domains including Trading Solutions, Connectivity & Integration, and Data License. What all these teams have in common is a strong sense of innovation with product development ownership. It’s also been a privilege to be involved with external initiatives, such as the OpenAPI Initiative.

It looks like you’ve worked on several Bloomberg teams throughout the years. What motivated your most recent moves? What surprised you most about them?
I really loved working in my previous group, but it’s healthy to mix it up and let in fresh ideas. I spoke to my manager about new opportunities and ended up joining the Data License team. It’s an incredibly fast-growing business and I was passionate about getting closer to handling data. I was amazed by the collaboration between the team members and their willingness to make sacrifices to help each other out. This made me feel very fortunate. One team, one dream.

What is it like moving to different teams within Bloomberg? How have you adapted?
The unknown can be intimidating, but if you have 100% of the skills to be successful on day one, then you’re not challenging yourself enough to learn something new. I’ve found my managers very supportive and receptive when I’ve expressed interest in a change. When in a leadership position, you also have to give opportunities to others who are ready to step up.

How have you been able to manage your career at one company for more than a decade? What advice do you have for others who might be on a similar path?
First, building key relationships with sponsors has made a big difference. The day I interviewed to join Bloomberg, the senior interviewer made a great impression, and they have continued to be an independent source of advice and encouragement throughout my many years with the company.

Second, as an engineer, I have learned so much by partnering with my business managers. Understanding the bigger picture of what they are trying to solve empowers you to intimately understand their challenges and see where you can help.

You’re very involved in a variety of D&I initiatives. Tell us about why this is important to you and some of the things you’ve played a role in to make our workplace more inclusive.
It’s important to advocate for the right thing, not just watch from the sidelines. There are D&I initiatives happening at all levels of the organization. Initiatives that I'm involved in sponsoring include the Enterprise Technology D&I Agile Team, Data License D&I Champs, and Women in Enterprise Solutions. It’s been incredibly rewarding to see participation from so many people.

What are your best tips for inspiring direct reports?
I like to encourage my leadership team to think and manage their areas as if it’s their own business. When things go well, pass on recognition to others, and when they don't, take ownership of failures and learn from them. If you believe strongly in something, disprove others who tell you why it can’t be done.

How do you inspire teams to innovate?
Giving the team confidence in trying new things. Every quarter we dedicate a development sprint for whatever the engineer wants to work on. This could be a solo or group project, learning a new technology, an idea for a business feature, or enhancing an internal tool. The decision is up to them.

"As an engineer, I have learned so much by partnering with my business managers. Understanding the bigger picture of what they are trying to solve empowers you to intimately understand their challenges and see where you can help."

– Richard Norton

Jin Yun Soo is a Software Engineer in the Enterprise Console Analytics Platform team, which is building and maintaining a real-time stream processing platform that handles enterprise data for purposes such as monitoring, analytics, and machine learning.

What’s the biggest challenge in your current work?
We have to consider aspects like high throughput, low latency, scalability, and reliability. We have been working on streaming components that are reusable for current and future use cases. For example, I was recently involved in enhancing the Apache Kafka connector in our Apache Flink platform to more effectively support time-sensitive jobs.

The team is constantly tackling new challenges. Since joining the team, I have had to iteratively learn and deliver quickly, yet thoughtfully. Some things that I find inspiring: how open source communities self-organize to shape the vision and design principles of various tools (we leverage open source tools like Kafka, Flink, etc.), the growing interest in Flink within the company, and the theories and logic that underlie fault-tolerant and stateful distributed streaming systems.

What is it like moving to different teams within Bloomberg? How have you adapted?
Within three years of joining Bloomberg, I took on two different job codes, lived in two different cities and continents, and worked on three different teams. While it sounds overwhelming, in retrospect it felt like a natural progression — one might not even realize in the moment how one thing could lead to another. Along my journey of self-discovery and challenges, I’m truly grateful to have encountered managers who vouched for me, as well as colleagues who support each other in various ways — we care for not only deliverables and technicalities, but also individual and collective growth. Through the Visiting Engineering program, I had the opportunity to collaborate with a sister team and to have hands-on experience on something new that, in turn, led to a relatively smooth transition when I transferred to that team.

Whether moving on to new opportunities or staying on the same team, it’s still all about constantly adapting and evolving in different ways. Things seem less overwhelming when we are open-minded, willing to learn and challenge assumptions, and keen to work with the people around us to build a great work environment. After all, a career is a journey, not simply a destination.

How do you foster a collaborative, inclusive environment at work?
People make culture. In turn, a positive work culture makes things better for people (i.e., employees of the company). I have observed a few traits in others that make them great to work with: empathy, willingness to listen and share, and paying it forward in various ways. Seemingly small things can trigger a domino effect that maintains a positive dynamic: informal chats to share experiences, introducing people who might benefit from and/or contribute specific insights to one another, and a safe space for people to share ideas and opinions constructively.

The Enterprise Technology D&I initiative provides an opportunity for individual contributors and managers alike to closely work together on pertinent matters as part of quarterly rotations. Engineers can play a part in shaping the course of the initiative, determining its priorities, laying the groundwork, etc. Through my involvement in the Advisory team and the Q1 Agile team, I had the chance to get to know colleagues I hadn’t worked with before. Through the monthly Office Hours, we hope to learn about various perspectives through conversations that develop organically.

In general, I think it is important to work together to build a workplace that not only creates opportunities for everyone, but also has a culture that empowers everyone to be innovative and grow professionally.

"It is important to work together to build a workplace that not only creates opportunities for everyone, but also has a culture that empowers everyone to be innovative and grow professionally."

– Jin Yun Soo

Kateryna Voievoda is the Engineering Team Lead for the Enterprise Metering Business Engine. She’s working on consolidating real-time and data license metering systems, specifically moving the Desktop API (DAPI) calculation over to the DL metering platform.

What inspires you about your current work?
I’m inspired by the complexity of this project. When you have two independent, mature production systems that have their reasoning and paradigms, coming up with a way to consolidate them into a single system is not an easy task.

What do you feel is an advantage to hiring more people with career experience outside of software engineering and financial analysis?
I don’t have a formal engineering degree. In my personal experience, the fact that someone has dozens of algorithms memorized does not necessarily translate into them being a good software engineer. I think it is important to remember that there are a lot of people out there who didn’t have the opportunity to go to specific schools or do internships, but are nevertheless talented, smart, eager to learn, and bring their unique way of looking at problems and solving them. I think you rob yourself and your organization of success by dismissing this talent based solely on titles or diplomas.

What advice do you have for people from underrepresented groups who are pursuing a career in tech?
My advice is don’t doubt yourself. There will certainly be people who feel threatened or uncomfortable by your presence, and they might try to use their experience, status, or public opinion about them to dismiss you. In these moments, it is easy to start doubting yourself. But, I encourage you to remember that you are where you are because of your intelligence, hard work, and willingness to take action and create change. Your voice is important. Your opinions are important. And you matter.

What are your best tips for inspiring direct reports?
The best way to inspire your direct reports is by leading by example. As a leader, it is important for me to show up for people, and to make sure I'm there with my sleeves rolled up, ready to jump in the trenches when the team needs me.

Another important thing for me to show is that I’m not a robot, that I also make mistakes and can be wrong, and that I’m comfortable admitting those mistakes and listening to every opinion.

"Don't doubt yourself... remember that you are where you are because of your intelligence, hard work, and willingness to take action and create change. Your voice is important. Your opinions are important. And you matter."

– Kateryna Voievoda

Check out some of the open roles with our Enterprise Technology Engineering team:

Senior Software Engineer - Enterprise Data License

Senior Software Engineer - Enterprise Metering

Senior Software Engineer - Bloomberg Connectivity & Integration Team

Senior C++ Engineer - Application Integration

The post Meet the Team: Enterprise Technology Engineering appeared first on Tech At Bloomberg.

First, let’s meet Engineering Manager Richard Labonté, the head of the Research Collaboration & Analytics Engineering team.

Tell us about your role as head of Research Collaboration & Analytics Engineering, and what the team is responsible for.
Our team is part of the broader Equity Research group. We are focused on helping research analysts find the best opportunities in the markets. We provide a full suite of tools to help them research, analyze, and interpret data to help them construct a clear picture of a particular investment opportunity.

More specifically, our group provides enterprise solutions for groups of analysts from the same firm or desk. We help them collaborate better with their peers by offering them tools to aggregate and share their documents via our FILE product. We also provide them with a note-taking product to gather their thoughts and present them to their colleagues via our NOTE product.

For research firms looking to sell their research to other firms, we provide many different ways to get precise and accurate valuations of their research and various interactions with their counterpart. This helps both sides obtain a neutral perspective on how valuable their research has been. To do this, we offer various utilities to capture interactions between firms — and even within firms — to help surface the necessary data for both sides to agree on a price.

We also provide simulated trading tools where analysts can maintain a virtual portfolio where they can sell their investment ideas to others. Finally, we also help them more directly on the research front by helping interpret their search query and find the data they are looking for.

What are some of the unique technical challenges your team needs to tackle?
As part of the Research department, it is really important for us to understand our client’s needs so that we can provide workflows that will boost their productivity. Some of our products, like NOTE or FILE, are used by a varied range of Bloomberg customers, so it’s also important to provide them with generic functionality that caters to their needs.

Briefly tell us about your career path.
I joined Bloomberg as an engineering intern in 2007. I was lucky enough to be offered the opportunity to have a second internship in 2008 and finally got a full-time offer in 2009. I worked out of the New York office for a couple of years before an opportunity opened up in London, and I was offered a transfer, which I gladly accepted. A couple of years down the line I became a team leader and then more recently an engineering manager.

What's your strategy for choosing team members?
I am always looking for someone who can bring something new to the team. It might be someone who has knowledge about things we don’t already know or someone who simply brings in some new perspectives. I am keen on having people who are proactive, collaborative, and proud to own part of our system.

What skills do you look for when hiring engineers for your teams?
A passion for getting things done, the right way. An ability to design complex large distributed systems. Great communication and collaboration skills.

What are some of the factors driving the rapid growth of your group?
There are a lot of opportunities in the Financial Research field. Bloomberg is well positioned, but we can do more. The company is very focused on this particular market and has invested a lot recently to ensure we are delivering the right tools that are competitive with other solutions in the market.

How do you foster culture on your team?
I always encourage people to seek the opinions of others, as well as to share their own. I also encourage everyone to think about what they’re passionate about and to share this with their team leader to help align their work and their passion.

"We are focused on helping research analysts find the best opportunities in the markets. We provide a full suite of tools to help them research, analyze, and interpret data to help them construct a clear picture of a particular investment opportunity."

– Richard Labonté

Ivaylo Pavlov is a Software Engineering Team Leader on the Notes team. He’s working on NOTE and its integration across various functions throughout the Terminal.

What is the biggest challenge in your current work?
The biggest challenge is the distributed nature of the system and the fast performance and real-time notifications our clients expect. What excites me is the level of impact our contributions can have on users' investment decision-making, combined with the cross-team collaboration and technical knowledge required to successfully deliver new features.

What made you decide to learn software engineering, and why apply it to the finance sector?
I was a summer intern in Bloomberg's Sales & Analytics departments in 2011, which opened the door to a full-time offer to join the company after I graduated. I joined the Analytics department in September 2012 with a focus on Equities, Trading, Technical Analysis, and Portfolios. Despite my finance focus, I always kept my technical knowledge up to date, with more of a data science focus (R, Python, Pandas, NumPy and Charting). I always tried to find a way to leverage my coding knowledge in solving client problems. After almost five years, I decided that I wanted to try to turn my hobby into a full-time job. I interviewed internally in 2016 and successfully joined the Engineering department, which started me on my path toward building scalable and fault-tolerant distributed systems.

What do you feel is an advantage to hiring more people with career experience outside of software engineering and financial analysis?
Having a non-software engineering background definitely adds a different point of view from which the entire group benefits. Everyone comes with their unique life experiences and perceptions of the world. When combining suggestions to arrive at the most optimal solution for a problem, having a variety of ideas is of utmost importance. A different career path is always a positive, as the ability to combine two fields of knowledge is a great advantage.

Bloomberg has a distinctive culture. What attracted you to it?
The level of support and collaboration throughout all my years in the company is definitely unique. I've been supported in all aspects of my professional growth, in both fields — finance and software engineering. I've received support in every endeavor I've asked to participate in, like attending a conference across the world or working on open source projects. Along the way, I've created life-long friends with who I still keep in touch on a regular basis.

How do you foster a collaborative, inclusive environment at work?
That's a good question. Personally, I believe it's the ability to express yourself freely and not being afraid to pitch ideas, no matter how wild they actually might seem at first glance. This keeps the idea generation spark alive and great ideas spread like wildfire. A safe environment in which to experiment builds trust, which fosters collaboration. Everyone being their genuine self and respecting every team members' opinion is essential to having an inclusive workplace.

What do you think a team must have to be effective and healthy, particularly during this time of disruption?
The core principles for a team should be trust and support, especially in times of disruption and frequent change. We were able to transition smoothly to working remotely due to the nature of the work that goes into software development. Providing support in difficult times and trusting people to do the right thing are what give people the opportunity to be empowered and productive. Looking after each other and checking in, even if it's for a virtual coffee, can make a world of difference.

"The level of support and collaboration throughout all my years in the company is definitely unique. I've been supported in all aspects of my professional growth, in both fields — finance and software engineering."

– Ivaylo Pavlov

Adriana Razoare is a recent hire who is rounding out her first year at Bloomberg. She is a Software Engineer in the Content Platform team, working on the Bloomberg Terminal’s FILE product.

What is the biggest challenge in your current work?
Always finding the best solution that meets our product and engineering standards. Finding all the pieces to the puzzle which we are endeavoring to solve, not only when it comes to dependencies on the technology side, but also on aspects relating to the excellent user experience we are offering our clients.

How did you find out about Bloomberg? What made Bloomberg stand out for you? Why did you choose Bloomberg?
Having previously worked on the tech side at two other financial companies gave me the opportunity to gather information about the company's activities, the quality of its products, and the people who work here. After a discussion about the company’s culture, as well as an insightful discussion with the Recruiting team, I decided to apply. I can confirm that my experience matches my impression from the research I’d previously done, with ample opportunities for me to explore and delve into.

Bloomberg has a distinctive culture. What attracted you to it?
The most crucial point was the collaborative feel that Bloomberg champions. This includes the diversity and inclusion of communities, its philanthropic values, and all the amazing tech groups here. Asking and offering to help is normal behavior here that is very much encouraged.

How does your involvement with Bloomberg’s D&I Communities impact your life? What are some of the activities you’re involved with?
As a relatively new joiner to Bloomberg, I am still discovering our D&I Communities, and I am especially grateful that these communities not only create a safe place for conversation, but also actively help members and take action to escalate and address issues to higher levels within the organization.

I personally believe in the importance of constant education around various diversity and inclusion topics, as there is always something more that can be done. Bloomberg is a great workplace that constantly promotes this.

Since July, I have been a member of WMCAL (Women in MCA London), and I worked alongside two other organizers to create a support network for all our members, helping them advance in their careers and grow their networks; raising awareness of all the resources at hand, including mentorship, technical programs, events and ongoing D&I work; and also collaborating with other D&I initiatives to achieve common goals.

"I personally believe in the importance of constant education around various diversity and inclusion topics, as there is always something more that can be done. Bloomberg is a great workplace that constantly promotes this."

– Adriana Razoare

Pedro Miguel Candeias Martins joined the Research Collaboration & Analytics Engineering team as a Software Engineer in May 2021. He’s working on a tool called TMSG, which allows customers to create investment ideas, like when to sell or buy stocks, track their performance over time, and share those ideas with other users.

What is the biggest challenge around your current work?
The biggest challenge I have faced so far is the scale of the product. As it needs to model most of the diverse strategies used in real financial systems, it can be daunting at times to try to understand all of its intricacies. But it is extremely satisfying when you do, and to see that you’re creating something that is used by a large number of users.

How did you find out about Bloomberg? What made Bloomberg stand out for you? Why did you choose Bloomberg?
When I began looking for internships during my studies, I learned about Bloomberg and thought it looked interesting. I attended a Bloomberg event at my college, where I learned more about the company and about the many challenges and opportunities it presented. I joined Bloomberg for the first time that summer as an intern. It was such a great experience that I did additional internships the following two summers and then decided to join full-time at the end of my studies.

Tell us about the mentorship you’re receiving at Bloomberg.
After going through the training program and joining my team, I was paired up with an experienced developer who guided me through the process of joining a team and beginning to make contributions to our code (e.g., learning to use our software development tools, learning about our systems, understanding the workflow within the team, etc.). We hold frequent one-on-one meetings where I’m able to ask more detailed questions. I am also surrounded by people who are experts in many different tools and technologies, and I am encouraged to reach out to them.

"As needs to model most of the diverse strategies used in real financial systems, it can be daunting at times to try to understand all of its intricacies. But it is extremely satisfying when you do, and to see that you’re creating something that is used by a large number of users."

– Pedro Miguel Candeias Martins

Di Wu joined Bloomberg seven years ago, and is currently the Team Lead for the newly formed Query Intelligence team. 

What is the biggest challenge in your current work?
Our biggest challenge as a team is to improve the overall search experience for research analysts by intelligently interpreting what they type into the search entry. It includes features such as search expansion with synonyms and search interpretation, leveraging our in-house NLP framework. In addition to the problem space being very interesting, we also have the opportunity to collaborate with a group of talented and inspiring people.

What is it like moving to different teams within Bloomberg? How have you adapted?
Internal mobility is highly supported within Bloomberg. The managers in my previous team actively helped me look for new opportunities across the engineering department. With the help of HR and our internal job posting function, I was constantly aware of the current and new openings within the company. Because I was proactively looking to change, I had the time to meet with managers who were hiring and to plan out my transition plan to ensure a smooth handover. As mentioned earlier, I am excited about what we are working on in the new team. It has been an amazing learning experience working with people in my current role.

What advice do you have for people from underrepresented groups who are pursuing a career in tech?
One piece of advice I would give is: we are all unique and remarkable in different ways, and it’s important to find your areas of excellence. Coming from an underrepresented group, you might have the urge to try to fit in or conform. Do not give up on your uniqueness. What makes you different can also be your areas of excellence. Within Bloomberg, we cultivate a diverse and inclusive culture. So don’t hesitate to let your voice be heard.

What are your best tips for inspiring direct reports?
If you are in the early stages of your career, it’s important to say “yes” to opportunities, even if you are uncertain about them. A heavy focus on exploration will be the best way to learn about yourself: what motivates you, what you are passionate about, what your strengths and weaknesses are, etc. Stepping out of one’s comfort zone is hard but very rewarding. After you have a good grasp of your passions and motivators, the ability to prioritize and focus on what truly matters to you becomes much more important. At this stage, you can dial down (but not stop) on exploration. Being able to say “no, thank you” to “okay” projects will reduce distractions and give you more time to work in your areas of excellence.

What else should we have asked you about? What else would you like to share about your Bloomberg experience?
Bloomberg has a relatively flat hierarchy within Engineering, which I personally appreciate. It means that we can customize how we would like to enhance our impact outside of our core responsibilities. For example, some engineers prefer to be the “guru” (becoming domain experts in certain areas), some want to be the “organizer” (focusing on improving team efficiency on top of their day-to-day engineering work), and some want to be the “informationalist” (being aware of technology trends both within and outside the company and sharing information with the team). This level of autonomy and ownership is part of Bloomberg's culture.

"In addition to the problem space being very interesting, we also have the opportunity to collaborate with a group of talented and inspiring people."

– Di Wu

Check out some of the open roles with our Research Collaboration & Analytics Engineering team (here and here).

The post Meet the Team: Research Collaboration & Analytics Engineering appeared first on Tech At Bloomberg.

Last month, Embracing Modern C++ Safely was released into the world. The book was written by John Lakos and Vittorio Romeo, with assistance from Rostislav Khlebnikov and Alisdair Meredith. All four are Bloomberg software engineers who have spent their careers applying C++ to solve some of the company’s biggest technical challenges.

But why do we need yet another C++ book? After all, one of the book’s principal authors, John Lakos, has already written two. And why now? Why Bloomberg? Who is this for? But first, why modern C++?

The revolution

In 1998, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) published the first global standard for C++. The language was already being used on nearly every computer on the planet, but this release was a major milestone for C++, establishing many useful features. The next decade brought only incremental changes, minor tweaks, and bug fixes; the Standards Committee did not have a formal roadmap for evolving the language. Eventually, the volume of useful features developed by the C++ community at large became too large to ignore, and computing power had increased to accommodate more demanding use cases. In 2011, a watershed new standard was finally released, adding many new features and significantly enlarging the Standard Library. What’s more, the Committee, recognizing the need for more regular updates, committed to a schedule for standardizing new features every three years.

The changes and additions in C++11 were so sweeping that they came to be seen not as an evolution but a revolution in what the language could do. What came after can be thought of as modern C++. These features are the focus of this book.

Many of these newer features offer opportunities to improve performance, expressiveness, or maintainability, yet they are of questionable safety in some sense. As the language grew in complexity, engineers could more easily head down a path that could yield potentially risky results for their employers. When dealing with large enterprise applications, the stakes are high, so these modern C++ features must be applied with caution.

Embracing Modern C++ Safely arose out of a paper co-written in 2017 (and revised in 2018) by Rostislav Khlebnikov, who leads the BDE Solutions team at Bloomberg, and the aforementioned Lakos, senior architect at Bloomberg. Among Lakos’ many roles, he serves as a mentor for C++ development worldwide and is an active voting member of the C++ Standards Committee’s Evolution Working Group. The paper concisely describes the new features in C++11. But at only 9 pages (in 11-point font), the paper could hardly do justice to the vast swath of changes comprising the release. Across its 1,376 pages, Embracing Modern C++ Safely expands greatly on the paper. The authors limited the book to features with which they have accumulated more than five years of experience. The current edition is an authoritative summary of C++11 and C++14 features, and future editions are planned to cover C++17 and C++20.

A veteran C++ programmer, Lakos provided leadership and stylistic vision for the book, while also serving as a “guinea pig” for the material. Romeo and numerous other contributors wrote the initial drafts about each feature, and Lakos used that material to learn more about the language’s newer features with which he was less intimately familiar. Khlebnikov led the revision process, helping to distill reviewers’ insights into clarified explanations of the different features.

Another contributing author is Alisdair Meredith, a senior software engineer in Bloomberg’s BDE team, who has served on the C++ Standards Committee since the inception of C++11. Meredith provided some historical perspective, drawing on his close experience with the Standards Committee’s decision-making process to explain precisely why and how the features work as they do.

“All the detail was captured feature by feature. There’s so much we uncovered on things that we thought were well understood,” says Meredith. “We had many different people contributing to these chapters, and I don’t think there was any single feature where I didn’t learn something new, and I’ve been doing some of these things for 15 years or more. The huge value for me is having it all in one place.”

Why Bloomberg invested its resources in this book

“At Bloomberg, we have a unique situation,” says Vittorio Romeo, the book’s other principal author. “We have pretty much every version of C++ co-existing because of our legacy platforms. So when you join Bloomberg, you’ll see code that was written decades ago, and you’ll see bleeding-edge C++ code that was written yesterday. Programmers need to understand why legacy code was written the way it was, while also learning how they can make improvements during migrations once we have access to new features. So this book could have been written only at Bloomberg.”

Romeo is a senior software engineer at Bloomberg who specializes in programming with modern C++. He spends a lot of time teaching Bloomberg engineers of all skill levels the risks and advantages of the language’s latest features. His experience as a trainer gave him years of student feedback upon which to draw and an intuitive understanding of how best to explain often complex concepts.

“Unlike many other C++ books, we are really trying to capture the experience that you can get only by using these features in practice on a large scale,” says Romeo. “Some of the issues described in the book become apparent only when you are working in a large organization. There are many great books on sale from many great authors, but many of them seem to stop at a superficial level, especially when teaching new language features. You regularly get a bunch of new C++ books a few months after each standard release, and they tell you what’s new and explain the syntax and how you can use new features in your toy project. But it’s impossible for a book to contain any real-world experience when it’s published only a few months after the release.”

“One of the interesting things about Bloomberg’s engineering ecosystem is that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of small, disparate teams that are cooperating and working together, but there’s no central authority that dictates absolute policy as to how code is written across the company,” says Meredith. “Each of these teams is working together with a common vision, but we all have our own separate guidelines. If you want to be successful in this kind of environment, you have to be prepared to constantly be learning. This book is a great resource to educate all the engineering teams across the company in a consistent manner so we can move forward in unison.”

Lakos adds that Bloomberg is an ideal corporate sponsor for the book: “We’re one of the few enduring tech companies that is big enough to absorb the massive time investment required to produce the book, since we will also reap its benefits for years to come.”

“This required a lot of research, a lot of money, a lot of buy-in, and a lot of risk, and that’s probably why no one has written a book like this before,” says Romeo.

The authors acknowledge a crucial reliance on feedback from a wide network of engineers from both inside and outside Bloomberg. Notably, Joshua Berne, Nina Ranns, Pablo Halpern, and Dr. Andrei Alexandrescu helped gather, revise, and refine the content as the authors worked through each feature.Who is this book for?

Embracing Modern C++ Safely serves as a teaching tool and reference guide for programmers working in large-scale enterprise environments, many of whom were trained on classic (as opposed to modern) C++. This book will enable them to take advantage of proven modern language features, while avoiding common pitfalls. The first chapter describes safe features that come with minimal risk, while the second and third deal with riskier conditionally safe features and unsafe features, which the authors urge readers not to mess around with until they really know what they’re doing. Knowing which features are better left on the shelf can be a value all its own.

“You can have a valuable experience reading the book thoroughly from cover to cover, but you don’t need to,” says Meredith. “You’ll still want to revisit it as a reference manual, even if you’re familiar with the material. I came to this project extremely familiar with the material, or so I thought. I was meant to be the technical expert, but it turns out I had a lot to learn.”

Although the book is relevant to programmers at all levels of an organization, Lakos believes it will be especially valuable to senior technical managers at large enterprises. Many of these leaders must make critically important decisions, but they might not be familiar with these modern C++ features. This book can guide such decision-makers regarding whether the use of a given feature requires extensive training for it to be maintainable. In some cases, these technical leaders may direct that certain features be used sparingly and for only good, objectively verifiable reasons. The book provides several examples of both safe and questionable uses, thereby helping leaders proactively prevent expensive blunders by their teams.

“You have folks who were excellent C++ programmers in their day and are familiar with sound design in C++03, who were promoted to team leads and managers and ultimately senior managers,” says Lakos. “There’s no way in the world they can keep up with the evolution of the language. Nonetheless, they have to make company-wide decisions. There are a lot of people out there who are still programming in C++03. This is a book that says without pretense, ‘If you're a good developer who understands C++03, this is the overlay that allows you to incorporate individual features with random access.’”

The book will also help guide firms as they allocate upskilling dollars. The book makes it clear which features are most accessible, useful, and safe for implementation — and therefore deserving of a company’s investment to teach — and which ones should be relegated for extremely niche use cases and restricted to advanced practitioners.

“As a trainer, I am excited about using the book as a reference to build courses,” says Romeo, who will be using Embracing Modern C++ Safely to derive development and training material for Bloomberg’s engineers in 2022 and beyond. “That will be super useful because I don't have to think about doing all the research. It’s already all there. Trainers will be able to tailor the book to their own company and will get lots of value from it.”

The book also helps facilitate knowledge sharing between seasoned programmers with institutional knowledge and eager programmers who want to implement shiny new features.

“Experienced talent needs to learn from budding C++ programmers to progress in the fresh features,” says Lakos. “But these ambitious professionals also need to hear from veteran programmers that there are things that you learn only through bitter experience.” Embracing Modern C++ Safely helps convey both lessons to both groups.Safety first

Collectively, the authors represent many decades of experience with C++, specifically within the context of large enterprise applications. They are quick to admit they’ve made expensive mistakes over the years and have learned from both their and others’ mistakes, and their goal is to prevent needless wastes of productive developer time and company money.

“We want to convey information that you would otherwise need years of experience to actually gain,” says Romeo. “Reading this book will immediately make you a much better software engineer, without having to go through years of pain. It will enable you to understand potential problems without risking your own skin.”

“This book was written with the enterprise in mind, not just the enthusiastic developer who wants to try out new features,” says Lakos. “When doing large-scale development, an engineer can inadvertently torpedo an entire organization while trying out fun new features.”

“One of the things we teach in the book is that you shouldn't take things at face value,” says Romeo. “Even if a feature seems pretty nice, and you start using it everywhere because it seems innocent in isolation, then when you get to the point of having multiple engineers or a larger scale, something that's seemingly inconsequential can become a pain. This is especially true if there is a long chain of dependencies between you and the other engineers, because you might need those people to change something so you can get your job done.”

“The pitfalls we chose to discuss in the book are not readily accessible,” says Khlebnikov. “At best, they are distributed throughout a vast sea of information. Someone mentions one in a conference talk. Another is written about in a book. It’s all scattered, and there wasn’t an authoritative source that collected them all in one place.”

“The ‘safe’ features in Chapter One are probably worth everybody's time,” says Lakos. “It's not a significant investment. The ‘conditionally safe’ features in Chapter Two are another story; some of them are a real investment in effort and time. The ‘unsafe’ features in Chapter Three are there to scare you. You're going to spend a tremendous amount of time learning why you shouldn't be using a given feature!”

Meredith adds, “For Chapter Two features, you want to read the ‘Potential Pitfalls’ section because these are features you’re most likely to use. For Chapter Three features, start with the use cases. If your specific use case is not there, you probably shouldn’t be thinking about using the feature.”

Despite these warnings, Embracing Modern C++ Safely is not prescriptive.

“The book doesn't prescribe any solutions,” says Khlebnikov. “That’s because those solutions depend on your respective organization. There are coding guidelines that have to be developed, and they will be different for different companies.”

“Words like ‘should’ are banned,” echoes Lakos. “We say, ‘If you do X, then Y will happen. When we call an idea ‘bad’ in the book, it’s a really bad idea. And we did our best to explain all the technical reasons why it’s objectively wrong, not just suboptimal.”Buy a copy of Embracing Modern C++ Safely.

The post Why 4 Bloomberg engineers wrote another C++ book appeared first on Tech At Bloomberg.

As part of Bloomberg’s larger efforts to engage the academic research community, the Data Science Ph.D. Fellowship awards financial aid and professional support to Fellows as they research their interests and gain real-world professional experience over the course of the academic year.

Each of these highly motivated students is engaged in research in areas relating to ongoing areas of interest at Bloomberg. In addition to providing mentorship and professional development for the next generation of data science talent, the Fellowship has helped build relationships between Bloomberg and academic researchers at a variety of institutions around the globe.

The goal of the Fellowship is to provide support and encouragement for a successful Ph.D. candidate, resulting in groundbreaking publications in both academic journals and conference proceedings, application development, open source contributions, and other forms of research dissemination. Participants were selected by a committee of Bloomberg data scientists from across the organization. They will also be supported through mentorship, career counseling, and research internships.

Let’s get to know this year’s Fellows:

[vc_column width="1/3"]

Helia Hashemi

University of Massachusetts Amherst

In her work in the information retrieval field, Hashemi is interested in developing machine learning models for search engines and recommender systems.

“Due to the nature of my field of research, engaging and collaborating with industry can lead to significant scientific and societal impact,” Hashemi says. “And many applications of information retrieval research exist within the Bloomberg ecosystem.”

Through her research and work at Bloomberg, Hashemi hopes to develop a framework that can lead to more accurate search and recommendations, and can also create new information access functionalities.[vc_column width="1/3"]

Shiyue Zhang

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Having heard about the Fellowship through labmates who participated in previous years (as well as a few who have interned at Bloomberg), Zhang was eager for the opportunity to do hands-on work alongside Bloomberg’s AI research scientists to further her efforts around text summarization in the context of real-world professional challenges.

“My goal for this Fellowship is to conduct impactful research on summarization and achieve more abstractive and faithful summarization,” Zhang explains. “I would like to see my research get closer to reliable real-world applications. Summarization is an important natural language processing (NLP) task that is widely useful in many applications, for example, news summarization, meeting summarization, and document summarization. I’m interested in how to make summarization models more faithful so they can produce summaries without factual errors, hallucinations, and biases.”[vc_column width="1/3"]

Namyong Park

Carnegie Mellon University

“My primary goal for the Fellowship is to develop effective techniques for mining and modeling dynamic networks,” Park says. “I look forward to seeing how my work can be applied to improve the way dynamic graph-structured data, such as the Bloomberg Knowledge Graph, is used in practice, while learning from that experience to further enhance the methods and identify interesting problems.”

It can be difficult to understand how real-world dynamic networks evolve over time, and to spot anomalies in them. Park’s research centers on developing tools to better approach these problems. This line of research could lead to a better understanding and use of real-world data, including temporal knowledge graphs and financial transaction networks.[vc_column width="1/3"]

Vivek Gupta

School of Computing, University of Utah

With his research interpreting the meaning of text fragments and the implicit relationships between them, Gupta’s work will have a direct impact on the financial world, where semi-structured tabular data is widespread.

By working directly within Bloomberg, where large amounts of textual data from around the world are part of the day-to-day workflows, Gupta hopes to “improve tabular reasoning for semi-structured data by incorporation of on-the-fly information retrieval/extraction techniques,” and in the longer run, to look at other roadblocks in current research into understanding text in tables.[vc_column width="1/3"]

Chris Yi

The College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Stony Brook University/SUNY

“Studies of the financial market rely heavily on high-quality data, and Bloomberg is the information hub of the global capital markets,” says Yi, whose research centers on generating synthetic financial time series with generative adversarial networks (GANs).

Working alongside Bloomberg’s experts, Yi is excited to use his Fellowship to not only build a framework for generating financial time-series, but also to apply it to practical financial applications such as providing market forecasts and generating derivative price quotes.[vc_column width="1/3"]

Xisen Jin

USC Viterbi School of Engineering

While pre-trained language models have significantly improved over the years, Jin is hoping to take this area of data science to the next level and address longstanding problems in the field. Jin’s research focuses on allowing language models to efficiently acquire the ability to solve up-to-date tasks, such as COVID-related question answering, without performance degradation on early tasks.

“I believe news-related applications in Bloomberg could greatly inspire my research, and I am excited about the opportunity to work with highly experienced researchers,” says Jin.[vc_column width="1/3"]

Swati Mishra

Cornell University

While machine learning (ML) systems are currently used to improve the efficiency of reporters, data journalists, and financial advisors, Mishra argues that they often lack the domain-specific knowledge required for tackling more complex challenges.

At Bloomberg, Mishra is looking forward to taking her research on the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and AI, and building human-centered AI tools that empower users for tasks such as information retrieval from large-scale data and human-in-the-loop AI news generation. “I cannot think of any other organization where humans are working alongside AI and having a significant impact on people’s everyday lives at such a massive scale,” says Mishra.[vc_column width="1/3"]

Chengshuai Shi

University of Virginia

Shi is one of a number of this year’s cohort who gravitated towards the Fellowship based on the word-of-mouth recommendation of a previous participant, Huazheng Wang (2018-2019). “His success under the support of this Fellowship motivated me to apply,” says Shi, also citing the opportunity to collaborate with top-tier research teams while exploring practical applications of his research.

Specifically, Shi’s work centers on developing efficient recommender systems, particularly within the newly proposed framework of “Federated Multi-Armed Bandits,” which incorporates features of federated learning into multi-armed bandits, a promising tool for recommender systems. Ultimately, the goal is to make this framework more suitable for real-world applications, while simultaneously improving privacy and robustness guarantees, a process Shi hopes to accelerate by seeing how data science tools are used at Bloomberg.[vc_column width="1/3"]

Chirag Gupta

Carnegie Mellon University

Gupta is currently at work designing algorithms focused on distribution-free uncertainty quantification in machine learning, with two primary goals: to be theoretically verifiable and to perform in the real world.

“I am excited about getting an industry perspective on my mostly theoretical research,” says Gupta. “I am also interested in finding a principled problem to work on for my internship, where I can make practical progress, but without sacrificing statistical principles.”

The post Introducing the Fourth Class of Bloomberg Data Science Ph.D. Fellows (2021-2022) appeared first on Tech At Bloomberg.

As a teenage Polish immigrant in Sweden who was flipping patties at Burger King by day and reading Richard Branson’s memoir by night, Sebastian Siemiatkowski dreamed of something bigger. Perhaps not as big as his eventual achievement: He co-founded a Swedish digital payments startup that now boasts more than 90 million customers worldwide and is valued at $45.6 billion. That makes it the most highly-valued fintech startup in all of Europe and second-highest worldwide.

Founded in 2005 and now operating in 19 countries, Klarna is one of Europe’s most successful unicorns that is now expanding furiously across the globe. The company’s business is summarized as a leading global retail bank, payments and shopping service, offering flexible payment options that enable consumers to either pay now or over time, without interest, for online and in-store purchases. Klarna's offering may be attractive to shoppers who’ve been burned by the myriad ways that credit cards ensnare consumers, with high interest rates and unexpected fees.

“They the credit limit and they push it into your face,” says Siemiatkowski. “Look, it feels like I have all this money to spend! But it’s not really the same thing as a positive balance on your debit account. I think people have really woken up to the bad practices and they are looking for alternatives that are more favorable.”

Klarna’s services also extend beyond payments, including delivery tracking, price drop notifications, inspirational content, and more that users can enjoy through the app.

So how does Klarna make money? Its primary business model is charging retailers a transaction fee. In return, retailers can offer their customers the option to spread payments for their purchases out over several weeks. An ideal use case is fast approaching — think of the many parents out there who are about to drop around $500 on the latest PlayStation or Xbox console. They need the gift now so there’s something for the kids to unwrap during the holiday season, but they might need to wait until the next paycheck to afford such a big-ticket item.

Siemiatkowski joined Scarlet Fu, Bloomberg Television and Bloomberg QuickTake host, for an online conversation on Friday, December 17, as part of the Cornell Tech @ Bloomberg Speaker Series. He shared the story of how Klarna is challenging big banks and credit card companies with a simple, but clever, spending solution.Instant gratification

While he was acquiring his master’s degree at the Stockholm School of Economics, Siemiatkowski and his co-founders, Niklas Adalberth and Victor Jacobsson, pitched their idea for Klarna in 2005. From that day forward, he got used to hearing the phrase “It’s never going to work.”

Siemiatkowski has worked hard to prove the naysayers wrong. Unlike most fintech startups, Klarna was profitable almost immediately. Only in the last few years has the company incurred losses, resulting from expansions into new markets, including the PayPal-dominated U.S. Klarna now processes over two million transactions every day, and has made strong in-roads stateside, with over 21 million users.

Klarna’s most popular service in the U.S., called “Pay in 4,” is emblazoned across many e-commerce platforms; shoppers pay back the cost of their purchase across four regular installments, paid out every two weeks. No interest rate, just a late fee of up to $7.00 in the U.S. if a customer misses payments, with Klarna restricting further usage so they can’t accumulate debt. The service is ideal for shoppers who may want to purchase a big-ticket item and expect to be able to cover the cost over the next few weeks. It’s also ideal for shoppers who, for whatever reason, have had difficulty qualifying for a credit card, don’t want to risk maxing out their credit card, or who may not want to do business with a big bank. It’s a kind of happy medium between paying up front with cash and using a credit card. Consumers undergo a soft credit check for every purchase they make, so Klarna only lends to those who can afford to repay. This is a stark contrast to credit cards, which set a credit limit and review it infrequently, allowing people to build up interest-bearing debt quickly.

“The dominant form is really people with debit cards who want to shop online, but find that a debit card does not work well for them,” says Siemiatkowski. “I think, in general, ‘installments’ is a healthier concept. It's very clear. You're paying down the debt with regularity. You're not just pushing it ahead of yourself for a long period of time.”

Klarna appears directly on merchants' checkout pages, and it has its own app on which users can browse product listings from a variety of Klarna’s merchant partners. According to Siemiatkowski, merchants partner with Klarna because they are seeing consumers reward them with higher average order values and bigger conversion rates.

The wide world of spending

Klarna has adapted its product offering over the years to shifting consumer trends, and the surprisingly disparate ways that people around the world spend their money. Siemiatkowski, for example, decided to enter the U.S. and UK markets when he perceived that young adults were abandoning the credit card model after their parents experienced their sting during the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

Some regions of the world that have less developed economies are actually more advanced in terms of the technology that’s available to consumers because they’ve leapfrogged more developed countries. In Latin America, says Siemiatkowski, installments have been a natural form of payment for a long time, so Klarna courted that market with other services. Russia is similarly advanced.

“If I go to an ATM machine in Russia, I can do fifty times more things than I can do at an ATM machine in Sweden or the U.S., and the same applies to a lot of Southeast Asian countries, China, and so forth. Take Africa — we talk about M-Pesa, which allows you to transfer money over mobile phones. It’s really recent here, but it’s been there for ten years. So we focus more on markets like Japan or South Korea because competition there is actually less than people think. You have entrenched players who maybe have gotten a little complacent.”

Nudging toward financial wellness

Because Klarna partners directly with merchants, they can gather much more data than banks can with a credit or debit card purchase. Your bank knows you made a purchase for $29 at Walmart. Klarna knows that you bought a size small Disney-branded sweater and a Gatorade at Walmart, and can use this information to build a richer profile of your purchasing behavior as an individual and as part of a demographic group. It’s nice for users to be able to track exactly what they’ve spent money on, and it enables Klarna to develop deeper insights into how consumers are spending with an underlying principle that adds value back to the customer and uses the data on their behalf.

“We already have tons of data to suggest that real-time information is much more powerful to predict people's spending habits and their propensity for potentially getting into debt,” says Siemiatkowski. Richer real-time data could help Klarna develop a credit scoring system that’s far more accurate, useful, and even more equitable than traditional scoring systems.

Siemiatkowski imagines a day when Klarna is able to not only provide short-term loans, but also financial advice based on all this data. Klarna has the potential to transcend its role as a retail lender, perhaps one day becoming an everyday financial partner for consumers.

“We do budgeting tools, and I genuinely believe, as we advance our investments in that area, that we are going to come to a place where we’re telling customers ‘You know what? Don’t buy that,’” says Siemiatkowski. He argues that, in the end, every customer has to make their own decisions, but Klarna will be able to provide advice or prompts to help its customers form healthier spending habits. After all, customers with healthy budgets are more likely to be able to continue spending in the long term.

“In a perfect market, the only thing you have to care about is, ‘What’s the value I’m creating for my customers?’” says Siemiatkowski. “I think in the long-term, that’s what’s going to drive competitiveness. You may have to be willing to do things that may feel like bad business, like saying “Don’t spend on right now.”

This is a new approach to financial services, but one that today’s consumers seem to be demanding. Siemiatkowski projects that the broad disruption in the finance industry, of which Klarna is just a small piece, is just getting started.

“By the end of this decade, we are going to see a massive change of the overall landscape of retail banking,” he says, comparing our current moment to the dawn of e-commerce, when experts made confident proclamations that online shopping would never catch on. Then prognosticators shifted to “Maybe books, but certainly not clothing.” Today, it’s hard for us to imagine anyone ever holding such views, but it takes companies like Klarna to bring new paradigms to life.You can watch the entire discussion below:

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