The LSE Directory / Alternative data
Bloomberg Second Measure is a consumer transaction data analytics provider that turns anonymised US credit and debit card purchase records into near real time estimates of company revenue, market share and consumer spending trends. Its self service platform lets subscribers track daily performance for thousands of public and private companies and brands, benchmark them against competitors, and explore spending by category and sub category. Data is delivered through the Bloomberg Terminal's ALTD and ECAN functions, through Bloomberg Data License, and as separate aggregated and transaction level data feeds, with reporting lags of 2, 3 or 7 days from the card swipe depending on the product. The firm specialises in intra quarter, transaction level visibility into US consumer facing companies, a niche used mainly by institutional investors, quantitative researchers and corporate strategy teams looking for an early read on performance ahead of quarterly earnings, plus journalists who cite the data as an independent check on reported results. Its analytics are built on a panel Bloomberg describes as more than 20 million US consumers' card transactions, which sets it apart from web scraping or survey based alternative data vendors. Its main edge over standalone data vendors is distribution: the dataset sits inside the Bloomberg Terminal alongside pricing, estimates and news, rather than requiring a separate subscription and integration effort. The company was founded in 2015 as Second Measure by Michael Babineau and Lillian Chou, who had previously built large scale player behaviour analytics tooling together at Electronic Arts, and it went through Y Combinator's Summer 2015 batch. It raised a 20 million dollar Series A in 2019 co led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Goldman Sachs with participation from Citi Ventures, bringing its total disclosed funding to 25.5 million dollars, following earlier backing from Jefferies, Norwest Venture Partners, Shasta Ventures, Foundation Capital and Y Combinator. Bloomberg L.P. completed its acquisition of the company on December 24, 2020; at the time of the deal, Second Measure's platform tracked more than 5,200 public and private companies. Bloomberg has since folded the technology into the Terminal as the ALTD alternative data function, which it launched in 2023 alongside the pre existing ECAN function. In September 2024, Bloomberg launched the Bloomberg Second Measure US Consumer Spend Index, a near real time gauge of spending across sectors including retail, food services, accommodation and air transportation, categories the company says together represent roughly 70 percent of US GDP. It is accessible to Terminal subscribers through Bloomberg's World Economic Analyzer and updates daily on a 7 day lag, extending Second Measure's data from single company tracking into a macro spending indicator.
