- Launched in 1982, the Bloomberg terminal is one of the most used tools on Wall Street
- Billed at $26,000 per year, it provides access to a great deal of financial information
- Despite the crises it has gone through, the platform has preserved its dominance
It is a tool relatively unknown to the general public but essential if you exercise a profession in the financial field. The Bloomberg Terminal was launched in 1982 and it still holds a special place in this industry.
So much so that in a newsletter, journalist Dan DeFrancesco of Business Insider wondered if its owner, Michael Bloomberg, was not the most powerful person in the world of finance. In fact, this terminal partly made his fortune ($94.5 billion), and above all he established his influence.
The use of this information platform is billed at $26,000 per year. For this price, the 325,000 customers have access to a multitude of data and analyzes on financial subjects. They can also make transactions, and identify key data to do so.
The Bloomberg terminal, an irremovable liner?
This tool has made them so addicted that it has survived many crises. In particular, we learned in 2013 that journalists from the Bloomberg agency could access certain confidential information from the terminal. At the time, some voices were raised, but we could see later that this did not in the least prevent companies from sharing crucial data on the service.
In 2015, Bloomberg terminals were also the victim of a global outage that lasted several hours. The company apologized, and then we could see the influence of the latter on the financial affairs.
The Covid pandemic in March 2020 was yet another ordeal for the Bloomberg terminal, but the latter passed it with flying colors, offering certain commercial offers to its customers.
So that our colleague concludes: “At this point, it’s hard to imagine what could topple Bloomberg. The world of finance will always need data, and Bloomberg will certainly have plenty to share…at a price, of course. »
Not everyone hears it that way, and the Bloomberg terminal has competition. We are thinking in particular of offers such as Refinitiv launched in 2018, S&P Global created in 2013 or FactSet which was launched in 2015. The latter, however, are lagging behind this juggernaut which is already very firmly established.
Moreover, far from resting on its laurels, Bloomberg is already working on the sequel and intends in particular to offer a BloombergGPT, to allow its customers to benefit from the progress of artificial intelligence.
