Just caught up with this article appeared on the A-Team website – Bloomberg is facing pressure from the industry with regards to users concerns about its initiative to make its codes freely available (see previous post Truly “Open” Bloomberg?). In the article, Max Woolfenden, managing director of FOW Tradedata, recognizes the potential of the BSYM website but advocates more progresses to be made in order to improve completeness of the data offered and in particular to clarify what exactly ‘open’ means.

According to A-Team, Bloomberg is also facing pressure with regards to a possible introduction of a new licensing structure for Service Provider Agreement (SPA) contracts for fund administration clients. Under the new system, fund administrators would be required ‘to pay per security in each individual client portfolio’, effectively changing the status of the fund manager to that of data re-distributor with all the cost increases that implies. It will be interesting to see where this heads – will the administrators simply pass the data costs through to their clients, absorb some costs as a competitive play or simply move away from using Bloomberg data?