Waters Rankings 2019: Best Reference Data Provider: Bloomberg

Though best known for the data available via its Bloomberg Professional terminal, Bloomberg has actually spent the past year working on making the data from the terminal available via the vendor’s other delivery mechanisms, and on expanding its reference data content, to win best reference data provider for the second year in a row.

For example, the vendor has begun exposing data from the terminal via its Data License service, which as a result has grown from supporting around 15,000 data fields to some 40,000 fields.

“We decided on a simple message to clients: one data, one source. We want to be that ‘one’ data vendor and source for clients,” says Brad Foster, global head of enterprise data and content at Bloomberg. “We want to make sure that the data we provide is clean, tidy, and in a standardized format. … Whether it’s a human or a machine consuming our data, we want to make sure it’s easy to consume and that we minimize the amount of ‘wrangling’ that our clients need to do.”

To attain that “one vendor” status, Bloomberg has also bolstered its derivatives and corporate actions datasets, adding futures and options reference data “from a significant number of global exchanges,” so that it now carries futures and options reference data for around 160 exchanges worldwide, compared to fewer than 50 before.

Over the same period, Bloomberg has added new corporate action types, enhancing existing ones—such as mergers and acquisitions, divestments, and spinoffs—and providing more timely delivery and greater accuracy. And while initially focused only on equities, Foster says he expects to expand the vendor’s corporate actions offering to cover fixed-income assets.

The next 12 months will see the aforementioned projects continue, along with anticipated increases in demand for data to meet the requirements of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s Fundamental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB), Foster says.