Bloomberg New Energy Finance
Native Mobile Apps for the Global Leader in Energy Research
"You need to pick the right partner, and trust them."
Jon Moore
CEO, Bloomberg New Energy Finance
Bringing Bloomberg's Energy Research to Mobile
Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) is a division of Bloomberg serving 2,500 clients in 50 countries, including the European Commission, BlackRock, HSBC, and the US Department of Energy. BNEF's web platform had been successful since 2004, but their customers were increasingly reading research on the go. Mobile apps were becoming a differentiator for leading research firms.
BNEF partnered with Future Workshops to design and build native iOS and Android apps for smartphones and tablets within a 4-month timeline. The engagement was structured so that BNEF's internal team could take ownership of future releases after launch.
Discovery-Led Design
We began with a Discovery phase, analysing existing user research on the daily routines of BNEF clients and workshopping a prioritised feature backlog with technical, product, customer service, and delivery stakeholders. The goal: define a focused value proposition for users who needed both quick news updates on the go and deep research capability.
We produced multiple interactive prototypes and tested them with the business team and end-users in London and New York. This approach avoided costly code changes later; the app's core structure was validated before development began.
Content Strategy That Changed the Organisation
BNEF's content library was extensive, and the challenge was delivering the right content to each user without overwhelming them. We designed a personalised feed that prioritised individually relevant content within a user's interests while allowing exploration of the broader BNEF research universe.
The mobile app did not just change the delivery mechanism. It changed how content was created inside BNEF: research summaries became shorter, analyst reactions were reformatted for mobile, and the editorial team adopted a "simplify and improve" discipline that carried across the organisation.
"We wanted someone to push back on our ideas. We didn't want someone to say 'yes, we will do it your way.' One of the impressive things about Future Workshops was that they had a way they wanted to run it. We feel we were in safe hands."
Albert Cheung
Head of Product Management, Bloomberg NEF
Built for the Long Term
BNEF chose a partnership model: Future Workshops would build the first version while up-skilling the internal team to own future releases. We ran weekly code demos for BNEF developers on both iOS and Android throughout the project.
In the final four weeks, BNEF developers joined our London office to work alongside our team on new features, learning our sprint process and gaining in-depth platform knowledge from our Lead Developers.
"Working with Future Workshops also gave us the chance to train two of our best developers. Not only are they now accomplished mobile app developers but they also own the app for the future. And that is the enduring value of collaborating with the best." - Jon Moore, CEO, Bloomberg New Energy Finance
The Result
In six months from inception, the app was scoped, designed, built, and beta-tested with 80 demanding enterprise clients. The feedback was unanimously positive.
"One of the reasons it worked so well," says Jon Moore, "was because the app did the things people wanted it to do, and a little bit more, but no one's come back and said something was missing."