Best Market Data Provider (Vendor): Bloomberg

With content including price data, reference data, news, research, estimates and analytics, the market data giant is known across the entire spectrum of the industry, serving both large and small shops, ranging from start-up hedge funds to Tier 1 investment banks.

Tony McManus, global head of real-time feeds, platform technology and service delivery at Bloomberg, says the strategy is based on three factors that make the vendor stand out. These are: acquiring and making available the best content, creating a global infrastructure to distribute content and make it easy to consume, and continuously improving client services and support teams.

Bloomberg continues to add content to its platform, with its latest focus being investments in its flagship market data feed, B-Pipe, which has recently been upgraded with newly improved real-time over- the-counter pricing data. New content acquisition is focused on helping users meet changing regulatory requirements, and McManus says: “In a tightly regulated market, it’s about providing high-quality market data along with comprehensive metadata, so users have ultimate transparency into benchmarking, risk exposure, best execution, and so on.”

From a user perspective, Bloomberg is known for its client services and is one of the only providers to offer access to content and technical specialists globally, and who are trained to truly understand the content from over 300 exchanges and thousands of contributors.