The LSE Directory / Data providers
Bloomberg L.P. is a privately held US financial data, software, and media company founded in 1981 by Michael Bloomberg with Thomas Secunda, Duncan MacMillan, and Charles Zegar, using a $10 million buyout from his Salomon Brothers partnership; Merrill Lynch took an early minority stake that Bloomberg later bought back, and Michael Bloomberg now holds roughly 88 percent of the firm. Best known for the Bloomberg Terminal (Bloomberg Professional Service), the company's enterprise data division sells that same underlying data outside the Terminal through two distinct products, B-PIPE and Data License. B-PIPE (Bloomberg Market Data Feed) is a managed, consolidated real-time feed that normalises data from 330-plus exchanges and 5,000-plus contributors, covering roughly 35 million instruments across the same asset classes available on the Terminal, equities, fixed income, foreign exchange and money markets, commodities, and derivatives. It is built for front-office and trading use, streaming without conflation from Bloomberg's global ticker plants, with additional local ticker plant installations in major financial hubs for lower-latency access, an entitlements management and reporting system for granular access control, and deployment on-premise, hosted, or via cloud (including AWS and Azure). Data License instead targets back- and middle-office workflows, delivering reference, pricing, fundamentals, estimates, ESG, corporate actions, historical, and regulatory data, more than 70 million instruments, 40,000-plus fields, and over 100 billion data points published daily, via REST API, SFTP, cloud-native integration, or the DATA GO web portal, with per-security, bulk, and cloud-hosted notebook (Virtual Data Room) delivery models. Both products serve the same institutional customer base as the Terminal itself: banks, asset managers, hedge funds, pension funds, and other buy-side and sell-side financial institutions, but they are aimed at systems rather than individual desktop users, feeding trading, risk, accounting, portfolio management, and compliance infrastructure. The Terminal remains Bloomberg's dominant revenue source (accounting for more than 85 percent of company revenue as of a 2011 estimate, at a subscription cost of roughly $24,000 per user per year), with the wider company reporting about $15 billion in revenue for 2024 and roughly 26,000 employees across 176 offices globally as of 2025. Bloomberg has also opened parts of its data infrastructure to third-party and non-display applications through its Bloomberg Programming API (BLPAPI), and B-PIPE has been made available as a managed offering on major public clouds (AWS and Azure), reflecting a broader industry shift toward cloud-delivered institutional market data alongside the traditional on-premise ticker plant model.
