January 12, 2016 - Bloomberg has acquired the technology assets of an Australian company capable of scanning enterprises for inappropriate communications in social media, using pattern matching technology.

The acquisition extends Bloomberg Vault's surveillance and governance tools to help clients monitor and control the use of social media and online collaboration applications, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, GTalk, Yammer, Skype for Business.

More than a thousand Bloomberg Vault clients, the majority of which are financial services firms, will be able to apply the technology to meet communication surveillance and archiving requirements for employee messages on social media channels. Bloomberg says users will additionally be able parse the data to better understand how employees use social media and online collaboration communications channels to gather insights, share information and interact with customers.

"The majority of communications compliance solutions and in-house surveillance programmes can flag activities, but lack the ability to look across multiple social and digital interactions dynamically to detect behavioral patterns," says Harald Collet, global head of Bloomberg Vault. "Through Bloomberg's acquisition of Netbox Blue's technology and domain expertise, our customers gain immediate visibility into dynamic interactions over social channels - not only to mitigate risks and gain compliance controls, but to derive a more complete and valuable picture of how their business uses these applications."

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.