Bloomberg Offers Free Access to Its Identification Codes
November 3, 2009
Bloomberg – which built a global business on charging for market data -- has begun providing its unique, proprietary identification codes for stocks, bonds, options contracts and other financial instruments for free on a new website called bsym.bloomberg.com. Its goal – to create open standards in the competitive financial information industry.
The interactive site allows users to look up descriptive information on a security by the name of the issuer or industry sector involved without paying for the cost of subscribing to a Bloomberg data feed. The lookup will provide the user with information such as the feed source for updated data on the instrument as well as the unique multicharacter Bloomberg identification code.
In a statement issued to Securities Industry News on Monday evening, Judith Czelusniak, chief communications officer for Bloomberg, said that the identification codes are the same ones used in the Bloomberg Professional service and enterprise data products. She also said that Bloomberg would also soon be disclosing the methodology behind how it creates its codes for free, but would not specify when that would occur.
Data experts said that Bloomberg’s open symbology, when published, would mark the first time a data vendor has ever released information on the algorithms used to generate its own identification codes. Such a scenario, they said, would not only save users some costs from licensing fees but also in the development of data storage applications.
Financial firms use instrument identifiers for trade analysis and price discovery as well as settlement and transaction reporting. The identifiers are also stored in securities master databases.
Data vendors often create their own identification codes for financial instruments which complement the identifiers issued by national numbering agencies such as the CUSIP Service Bureau in New York for North America. That means that financial institutions must internally cross-reference identification codes from multiple sources – a cumbersome and costly process.
“Bloomberg’s free access to ID codes could give it a competitive edge over other data vendors and make it an industry standard,” says Ed Ventura, president of Ventura Management Associates, a Princeton, N.J. consultancy specializing in data management issues. Thomson Reuters, for one, does charge for the use and distribution of its proprietary Reuters Identification Codes (RICs) through licensing fees to their data feeds.
On its bsym.bloomberg.com website Bloomberg touted the merits of its free strategy over those of its competitors. “Other organizations assert proprietary rights over their identifiers, impose significant limitations on their use and either charge users license fees or include their symbology licenses with the purchase of related products,” said Bloomberg. By contrast, Bloomberg “users would be able to use the identifiers for a variety of uses including trading, research, and mapping.” Bloomberg went on to say that an effective symbology for any class of instrument must have broad coverage, be widely available at a low cost, flexible enough for use in multiple functions, allow mapping to alternative symbologies used in related functions, and be dynamic enough to immediately account for the many instruments that arise, expire, and change on a daily basis,” wrote Bloomberg on the bsym.bloomberg website. “Bloomberg believes that its BSYM will satisfy all of these requirements.”
Although Czelusniak says that Bloomberg’s decision was prompted by the desire to help its customers save money, the new service does follow the European Commission’s investigation into the fees data vendors charge for providing their customers with access to financial identification codes.
