Waters Rankings 2020: Best Market Data Provider—Bloomberg

For Bloomberg, the past year was one of entrenching its position, repeating last year’s win in the best market data provider category, and upgrading and expanding the Enterprise services it provides, consolidating its position with clients beyond just users of its Bloomberg Professional terminal.

After making its B-Pipe data feed available in the cloud last year via Amazon Web Services, and receiving a positive response from clients, Bloomberg has since gone “fully global” with AWS and is now making B-Pipe available via numerous AWS locations worldwide, says Tony McManus, CIO of enterprise data at Bloomberg. To make the most of this migration to the cloud, Bloomberg rebuilt its monitoring and entitlements systems last year to be web- and API-based. The vendor has also been adding content from other parts of its business to its Enterprise services, such as making every dataset available via its Data License service also available via its real-time services.

Some of these upgrades were scheduled in response to client demands for specific content—for example, making its popular terminal-based real-time volatilities product available via an API for use in other applications. Other upgrades were driven by the Covid-19 outbreak, including a “massive” backbone upgrade for Bloomberg Anywhere, the vendor’s web-based terminal access product, in response to significant increases in usage as more clients started working from home, without adversely impacting the vendor’s level of service. McManus says Bloomberg is proud of the level of support it was able to provide to clients who shifted to work-from-home models, and of the productivity of its own 20,000 staff who have also been working from home since the outbreak.

Finally, the vendor has also looked at which of its products—such as its Liquidity Monitor—could help clients address their changing risk profiles resulting from the current environment. “Everyone is trying to figure out how to respond in real time,” McManus says. “Because we work with customers in a way that takes a consultative approach, that really helps to differentiate us.”