4 advantages of Bloomberg's open architecture

To stay competitive in an accelerating investing landscape, buy-side firms need to continually optimize how they work — from making faster and more informed decisions to reducing systemic and operational risk to minimizing operational costs.

Utilizing technology solutions with open architectures — that is, those developed for interconnectivity, using open standards — helps firms continually improve across those and other areas. Bloomberg’s open architecture can benefit buy-side firms by providing them with programmatic access to security data and research tools, risk analytics, core trading capabilities, interoperability with the Bloomberg Terminal, and a host of other functionalities.

Utilizing that programmatic access can ultimately quicken the pace of firms’ operations while equipping their team members to better serve clients. Here are four of the top advantages of Bloomberg’s open architecture.

1. Enhanced collaboration

Bloomberg solutions equip team members at buy-side firms with clean, fast, and reliable insights based on the financial industry’s most trusted data. Firms can achieve deeper collaboration by taking advantage of the quality and speed of those insights.

Gaining consistent access to unified data sources is one of the key benefits of utilizing Bloomberg solutions. That access — which is powered by the open architecture of Bloomberg’s Buy-Side Solutions — enables firms’ team members to collaborate more efficiently and effectively, ultimately leading them to

generate smarter investment ideas that better deliver for clients.

2. Seamless integration

Third-party system integration and interoperability are also essential to driving efficiency gains and improving productivity for market participants. Buy-side firms already utilize a variety of technology solutions in their day-to-day trading and trade management processes and workflows, and many are increasing their budgets for investing in new solutions as they look to incorporate the capabilities of artificial intelligence and other innovations.

Firms achieve better data and insights when data flows seamlessly between buy-side firms’ many systems. Bloomberg’s open architecture provides third-party integration with a variety of technology solutions from a variety of trusted vendors. Bloomberg also continually modernizes and improves the consistency throughout its application program interface (API) frameworks, which in turn improves how those frameworks support the inter-system connectivity that helps team members better communicate and collaborate on workflows. Streamlining workflows and sharing context between front office applications and the Bloomberg Terminal can be achieved with Terminal Connect. Facilitating more efficient communication with Instant Bloomberg (IB) can be achieved with the IB Connect suite of APIs that facilitate the flow of collaboration to internal and external users.

3. More impactful innovation

Improved connectivity and enhanced collaboration also contribute to buy-side firms’ ability to innovate.

Whether they’re focused on sharpening how they identify profitable investment opportunities, incorporating ESG into their strategies, advancing how they assess and mitigate risk, or enhancing client experience, innovation is key to staying competitive.

In fact, firms can compete more aggressively by innovating to incorporate quantitative approaches into all aspects of their investment processes. Bloomberg’s open architecture provides a customizable, turnkey platform upon which buy-side firms’ team members can build, test, and share data and research, ultimately helping them achieve faster time to market. Bloomberg’s BQuant offerings, for example, enable buy-side firms to build their own applications within Bloomberg and put Bloomberg’s comprehensive data and market intelligence to use.

4. Improved scalability

As they continue innovating (and speeding time to market), firms may need their solutions to scale with them as they grow. Those solutions need to address every consideration ranging from research and idea generation through post-trade settlement and beyond.

Bloomberg’s open architecture provides scalability to buy-side firms by offering comprehensive, fully hosted technology that addresses the entire investment lifecycle. As an open-architecture solution, Bloomberg provides data access through the public cloud — allowing Bloomberg clients to benefit from the best of both worlds.

How we can help

Our open architecture is just one way we’re able to deliver real-time, multi-asset class and multi-jurisdictional solutions to help streamline complex processes, reduce risk and lower costs. From reconciliation, collateral management, trade settlement and connectivity to custody, admin and accounting workflows, we provide robust post-trade support that hedge funds can rely on.

Streamlining post-trade workflows
Maintain control over the quality and accuracy of your investment positions with a clear, accurate view. Reconcile positions, transactions and cash from single or multiple sources, and identify risks via automated reconciliations and prioritize breaks based on magnitude.

Allocation matching & trade settlement
Meet evolving regulatory demands, increase trade processing speed, boost productivity and reduce trade fails and improve settlement rates with industry-leading connectivity and partnerships — with all settlement exceptions across asset classes, regions, and trading strategies centralized in a single portal.

Find out more here.