Best Reference Data Provider: Bloomberg

After winning the award for Best Reference Data Provider in the Waters Rankings last year, Bloomberg continues its winning streak in this category. 

Over the past year, the company has worked extensively to provide reference data that was previously only available on its terminal to clients through a data license. Some of the new content available to data license clients includes environmental, social and governance data on 11,500 companies, fundamentals data on 85,000 companies, data on more than 1 million supply-chain relationships, and two new classification schemes covering both entities and instruments, as well as new security ownership data. Consequently, the number of reference data fields available to data license clients has expanded from 13,000 a year ago to more than 40,000 today.

“Our reference data business is core to our enterprise data offering and offers us and our clients the building blocks to build a much deeper relationship,” says Bradley Foster, global head of enterprise data content at Bloomberg. 

Having those base layers of reference data is becoming increasingly important to our clients and is in part why we
have made big investments in this area. Going from 13,000 to over 40,000 data fields clearly shows that we are serious about this business.”

As part of those investments, Bloomberg has enhanced existing datasets, including corporate actions, where it has added data on complex events, mergers and acquisitions, divestitures and spin-offs. It has also expanded its futures and options data package, which provides reference, pricing and greeks data on listed derivatives. The package covers more product types, increasing the total number of contracts by 40%. It also offers more timely delivery, so customers can have their security masters ready before trading and seamlessly connect with more than 180 exchanges.

Bloomberg will continue to enhance these datasets, for instance by expanding fixed-income corporate actions coverage. In a more strategic sense, the real value to clients will be in showing how all the reference and other datasets link together—an area in which Bloomberg is spending a lot of time working with clients. 

All of this work feeds into Bloomberg’s “one data” proposition. “We want to be the one-data provider,” says Foster. “This means we want to offer a more comprehensive and consistent data offering. We also want to offer more cost-effective and simplified distribution with data that is fast, reliable and easy to consume, and we want to offer clients data that’s clean, tidy and ready to use, whether by human or machine. When we look at what we have done over the last year with our reference data business,
it’s easy to make this statement.” 

Read more about the Inside Market Data & Inside Reference Data Awards 2019 winners