Waters Rankings 2022: Best reference data provider—Bloomberg

Overview

Bloomberg’s reference data offering encompasses terms and conditions, corporate actions, ESG, company financials, supply chain, holdings and ownership, and legal entity data. Clients use this data to feed their operational workflows and inform decision-making across the front, middle and back offices. 

The Solution

Bloomberg’s reference data offering is designed to be easy to use, enabling clients to make faster investment decisions across the business. Instrument reference data and analytics, corporate actions data, issuer risk, and metadata use a consistent and transparent frame of reference with maximum third-party application compatibility through connective open symbology.

Secret Sauce 

For the fourth year in a row, Bloomberg wins this category thanks largely to the depth and breadth of its reference data, in addition to its product innovation and focus on making it as easy as possible for clients to automate the consumption of its reference data. Clients can access Bloomberg’s reference data via Data.Bloomberg.com, a web-based platform, or via Bloomberg API and the cloud. 

Recent Milestones 

• Enhanced futures and options coverage: Bloomberg offers a security master for listed derivatives covering over 170 exchanges delivered pre-market, intraday and end-of-day.
• Expanded investment book of record (Ibor) fallback transition fields and new Alternative Reference Rates structures
• Increased corporate actions coverage across asset classes and streamlined access via Bloomberg Rest API and the cloud

Future Objectives 

• Bloomberg will relaunch fund reference data to further support workflows across numerous use-cases.
• It will further expand notifications of new issues so that customers can set up preliminary securities ahead of pricing.
• It will continue to invest in portfolio holdings and ownership products for expanded ongoing and historical coverage to assess liquidity, prospecting and idea generation.