Ex-BMO Tech Head Launches ‘Read-Only’ Twitter Tool

The application was built by Danny Watkins, former head of technology at BMO Capital Markets, the investment banking subsidiary of Canada’s Bank of Montreal, and has been in beta testing for the last few years under the working title TweetSentry.

Watkins has now rebranded the application as Market EarlyBird to reflect its ability to allow traders and analysts to filter tweets and extract news signals before the rest of the market, while also—by making it a “read-only” application—minimizing the risks associated with Twitter use by employees of financial institutions.

“While working at BMO Capital Markets, we found the real issue with using Twitter on the trading floor is that it gives firms the ability to tweet out, but there are a lot of compliance reasons to not allow that to happen,” Watkins says. “For example, a trader only has to tweet that they’ve had a big order come in publically instead of privately to bring the firm into disrepute.”

Watkins began looking for a read-only version of Twitter, and—after being unable to find anything in the market that met these requirements—left BMO to build his own, which he developed working closely with a number of customers, including a hedge fund and most recently an unnamed global investment bank that this month rolled out 100 licenses to analysts and research professionals across the firm. 

“Other data providers in the market filter Twitter before sending it through, but the [investment bank] told me that they’ve got ‘the best analysts in the world,’ so they don’t want an application that decides what they can and can’t read,” he says.

The vendor has spent the past year honing Market EarlyBird so that it not only provides users with a read-only, full-recorded version of Twitter—as well as the ability to block tweets and direct messages, and manage data leakage—but also includes extra “bells and whistles” designed specifically to help financial services firms extract useful news and decide whether they can trust information when it arrives.

For example, in recent months the vendor added a new function that categorizes lists of Twitter accounts by sector or region—such as, commodities, finance, or emerging markets—and a “suggestions” tool (similar to that used by Amazon to suggest other purchases), which suggests other Twitter profiles that firms might be interested in based on who they currently follow. The vendor also provides a “clout” score that indicates individuals’ importance on social media, and encourages users to follow cashtags, which denote a company’s ticker symbol rather than its full name, to create more manageable feeds of company data.

The application is a cloud-based, so firms do not have to make any changes to their firewall. Watkins says it’s very likely that banks block Twitter at the firewall so the vendor leverages a Microsoft Silverlight client, which can run in the browser, and which then communicates with the vendor’s server in the cloud.

“In the client [interface], the customer can say ‘I would like to follow this person,’ and we use our own Microsoft Azure servers to communicate with Twitter to distribute the tweets. From the user perspective, they have the full Twitter user experience, so they can see the tweet, the background to tweet, who that person follows, and who follows them,” Watkins says. “Twitter is about the background information as much as the tweet itself, yet quite a lot of services look for stories coming out, but they don’t offer it as the full Twitter experience,” he adds.