Bloomberg Intelligence Expands Primers Library, Adds Topics Like Brexit, Mifid II

The service is designed to help buy-side firms improve their workflow processes and to quickly search for independent analysis that is backed by data from more than 300 proprietary and third-party providers. Currently, Bloomberg has primers on 1,200 companies and 1,900 research notes in total.

These reports are relatively short—for example, reports on the Brexit (the UK's referendum this week on whether to leave the EU) range from seven to 13 pages with a fair amount of white space and graphs—and they do not offer investment recommendations or estimates. They aim to get users up to speed on a company, country or topic, for example, in the span of 20 minutes.

David Dwyer, global director of research for BI, tells Waters that in October, the vendor began rolling out primers on companies. With that infrastructure in place, they started expanding into other areas.

"Three or four months ago we started rolling out government policy primers," he says. "So, as an example, for Verizon, what are the major policy issues facing Verizon today? Or what are the major litigation issues facing Verizon today? Our economics team started to realize that we could do primers on countries, as well, such as for Japan, Brazil or Mexico."

From there, BI has grown the library.

Quick, Topical Views

Dwyer says that the primer that took the most work was the "topics" offering. Currently, Bloomberg has primers on over 60 topics, which includes things like Brexit, Obamacare, blockchain, sustainable investing and Mifid II. He says he envisions the offering growing to "hundreds" over the next 12 months.

"We had a proliferation of primers and that created a challenge for our clients to find that information. It was easy when it was just companies because you could just type in a ticker symbol and get the primer on the company. Once the number of primers and the variation of primers increased, the challenge to find those things increased with it," Dwyer says. "That's why this is an important launch today."

Subscribers can access the library by using the function {BIP < GO>}. Dwyer says that as the service expanded to countries, commodities, industries and—most challenging—topics, the search and tagging functions became more complex. As a result, it took BI six months to develop these new features.

"What we found is we had a hard time helping our clients find all this content. What we did is create a whole library front end to help them to very quickly navigate and filter down into all the different primers we have," Dwyer says. "For topic primers, we really had to work on how we would structure a tagging system by topic and relate those tags back to the specific topic. We also had to look at how we would develop those topics over time as the topics grow. Brexit is a good example: It started as one topic primer, but as it became a bigger and bigger issue, it morphed into three different topics."

Brexit

Dwyer says between Bloomberg's news organization, various other media assets and research department, a lot has been written on Brexit. BI's job is to package that information in a way that can help users quickly get up to speed on the vote.

For Brexit, BI has three different primers: the economic impact, which talks about the economic impact of the UK leaving the EU from a macro perspective; the regulatory impact, which looks at the impact on financial regulation if a Brexit were to happen; and the industry impact, which is specific to major sectors and industries throughout the European economy and how they would be affected.

So for the economic impact primer, BI's Dan Hanson put together seven-page report that Waters was able to review. In it, he listed his five "Key Points": Leaving EU Would Mean Short-Term Shock, Long-Term Risk for UK; Brexit Would Shock UK Confidence, Credit and Exchange Rate; Vote for Brexit May Have Modest Impact on US Economic Growth; Leaving the European Union Would Put UK Trade Flows at Risk; and Brexit Impact on London Financial Center Likely to Be Gradual. From there, Hanson went into greater depth on those five points.

Dwyer says that for the future, BI will continue to expand the number of companies that the vendor provides primers on, and will look to expand into more regions, including emerging markets.

He adds that while BI's economics research is a global product, its litigation research, government policy research and credit research are primarily US-focused.

"So those are areas that we would like to expand globally," he says.