FINRA Recognizes Bloomberg Open Symbology

The US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) now allows for Bloomberg Open Symbology in its Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine (TRACE).

Open Symbology (BSYM) is a free alternative to proprietary naming conventions, which can be costly to license for regulatory-mandated reporting purposes. The 12-digit Bloomberg Global Identifier, at the heart of BSYM, covers more than 75 million global securities.

"Firms often have to license several proprietary symbologies in order to manage trading operations in multiple markets and across asset classes," says Peter Warms, head of Bloomberg's Open Symbology group. "BSYM is a robust, open and free-use alternative to proprietary libraries. Its ongoing adoption reflects the industry's desire to maximize market connectivity and transparency, while facing the need to reduce costs."

Under rules from the US Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), broker-dealers registered with FINRA are obliged to report trades of corporate bonds and securities to the TRACE system within a specific period.

Some sources, speaking on background, questioned the usefulness of BSYM for large organizations with deep order books, explaining that they were limited to 5,000 free instrument downloads per day using the identifier. One executive from a major investment bank in particular said that, as their requirements stretch into the millions per day, this didn't allow for operational efficiency in their activities.

'There are no charges in any respect," says a Bloomberg spokesperson, questioned on the limits. "The 5,000 limit only applies to custom searches on the BSYM site. These down-loadable files are in a .csv format which consume large amounts of bandwidth and could potentially slow the site down. Bloomberg also offers predefined searches via the BSYM site, segmented by asset class, which can be downloaded in full. Moreover, we also offer full end of day files delivered via FTP, which are also segmented by asset class."