Best alternative data provider/vendor—Bloomberg

Product overview—Bloomberg Alternative Data

Bloomberg continues to affirm its position as one of the industry’s foremost providers of alternative data, providing data that allows its clients to understand the world with greater speed, depth and clarity. In 2024, it launched and enhanced a number of its solutions, including Transaction-Level Data Analytics, a granular transaction datafeed delivered on a two-day lag, allowing clients to have maximum control and flexibility in creating detailed insights into company performance and consumer trends for more than 4,000 brands.

Secret sauce

Bloomberg Alternative Data solutions provide clients with access to a range of high-quality alternative datasets. These solutions are integrated into the Bloomberg Terminal and are available as datafeeds for use across the enterprise, enabling investors to incorporate the data into user and automated workflows to better inform their investment strategies. The new Transaction-Level Data Analytics product provides high-speed transparency and depth of insight into company performance and consumer behavior.

Recent milestones

• Launched Transaction-Level Data Analytics, which includes brand and company metadata, and is delivered with a two-day lag via AWS S3
• Launched the Bloomberg Second Measure (BSM) US Consumer Spend Index, which uses Bloomberg’s proprietary alternative data to provide a near-real-time view of US consumer spending with a seven-day lag
• Made BSM transaction data analytics feeds with a three-day lag available via Bloomberg Data License and Data License Plus (DL+) for enterprise-wide use.

Future objectives

• Partner with additional alternative data partners—Similarweb, for example—in its Bloomberg Terminal products, increasing company and sector coverage globally
• Launch proprietary estimates of company-reported key performance indicators using alternative data metrics, enabling research analysts to use alternative data for measuring company performance
• Increase the availability of key alternative datasets in its BQL application programming interface, with a unified data model enabling interoperability between datasets
• Lead the market with new ways of measuring consumer economic health through alternative data.

Why Bloomberg won

Bloomberg follows up its success in the Best alternative data initiative category of last year’s IMD & IRD Awards by going one better and walking away from this year’s edition with the title of Best alternative data provider/vendor. Alternative data—data collected and scraped from non-traditional sources, such as shipping data, satellite imagery, footfall data, crop-yield data and credit card data—is by no means a new class of data, but it is playing an increasingly important role across the buy side as firms seek to identify any market or company trends that might inform their investment strategies. Bloomberg’s position as the go-to provider of traditional datasets for numerous buy-side and sell-side firms positions it perfectly to add alternative data to feeds it is already providing its clients worldwide. When added to its reputation for providing trusted, high-quality data, this makes for a compelling service that is nigh on impossible for any other provider to match.