Equity derivatives is a mature, highly transparent market where competition is intense and margins are under pressure, but what has changed is the increasing pace and complexity of the workflow, according to Simon C. Watts, Head of Product Development for Listed Derivatives and Delta One at Bloomberg.
“At the same time, clients are increasingly automating pricing, hedging, risk, and analytics. That means they need liquidity and market color in a form that is accurate, timely, and machine-readable — not trapped in voice, chat, or manual workflows,” he told Traders Magazine.
“This is exactly where a tool like Options IOI becomes valuable. It helps convert high-touch broker intelligence into structured, actionable signals that clients can consume in their own workflow,” he added.
On Monday, June 1, Bloomberg introduced Options IOI {IOIO }, a new monitoring tool aimed at helping equity derivatives traders manage large volumes of pricing information, identify liquidity more efficiently, and accelerate decision-making.
“We believe the inter-dealer broker remains essential, particularly for managing large, complex blocks of risk where human judgment, trust, and market knowledge matter,” Watts said.
“The opportunity now is to enhance that role with technology, preserving the human expertise that drives liquidity, while making the surrounding workflow faster, more transparent, and easier for clients to integrate,” he added.
The solution uses Bloomberg’s natural language processing (NLP), tailored to the specialized language of derivatives markets, to identify indications of interest (IOIs) within Instant Bloomberg (IB) chats and consolidate them into a centralized view.
Watts said the platform is designed to bring greater efficiency to complex off-exchange liquidity workflows, where pricing information is often fragmented across multiple channels.
“Options IOI brings efficiency to complex off-exchange liquidity workflows where equity derivatives pricing data is disparate, ultimately saving traders time,” he said.
Bloomberg’s NLP converts free-text conversations and trader language from Instant Bloomberg chats into structured, machine-readable data in real time, allowing users to access pricing signals without changing their existing workflows, according to Watts.
“We bring structure to an unstructured marketplace by using Bloomberg’s NLP to convert the language of a trader and free text from Instant Bloomberg chats into machine-readable content in real time—without requiring users to change their existing behaviour,” he said.
Once the data is structured, traders can sort and filter liquidity information, compare it with live market prices, and move directly back into the relevant chat with a liquidity provider. Heavy users can also feed the data directly into their own risk systems through an API connection, Watts noted.
According to Watts, Bloomberg is seeing continued investment in automation across the market, increasing demand for high-quality, machine-readable data.
“Any technology is only as effective as the data that powers it. We believe data sourced from a user’s Instant Bloomberg chats is exceptionally high quality because it reflects the most current pricing information available,” he said.
Watts added that Options IOI helps traders uncover liquidity opportunities that might otherwise be missed across multiple applications, while reducing manual steps between identifying a trading opportunity and executing on it.
The platform also standardizes broker IOIs into comparable data points that can improve alerting, prioritization, and execution quality, while preserving the high-touch relationships that remain central to equity derivatives markets.
Bloomberg’s research found that the greatest challenge lies with buy-side and other price-taking firms, which must monitor large volumes of information across multiple markets. By improving that workflow, Watts said, brokers and liquidity providers also benefit because their liquidity is more likely to be surfaced and acted upon.
“Our goal is to develop efficiencies that drive liquidity, which is beneficial for all market participants,” he said.