The Bloomberg Terminal still generates billions in revenue, but it faces significant headwinds that are having an impact on the business across each major function of the terminal: Morgan and Bank of America were planning to cut up to 7,000 Bloomberg Terminals - the equivalent of about $168,000,000 a year. Then in 2008, the global financial system began to collapse.ĭuring and after the economic downturn that followed the crisis, banks began cutting costs. The Bloomberg Terminal increased the efficiency and working intelligence of Wall Street, and this helped contribute to the financial industry growth throughout the decades to come. The 1980’s saw new types of financial instruments like derivatives and more complex markets - Bloomberg helped simplify and make sense of it all. It was the perfect instrument for a Wall Street that was about to enter its boom years. It then could be updated constantly throughout the trading day with a simple keyboard command. Rather than, say, draw a yield curve for a security from scratch - a process requiring expertise and time - a junior banker could use a Bloomberg Terminal to automatically get the live chart. When it first arrived in 1982, the Bloomberg Terminal transformed Wall Street. The disruption of Bloomberg terminal, function by function
By doing so, it has made itself increasingly vulnerable to disruption. The world is changing around Bloomberg, but Bloomberg has been resistant to changes that might cannibalize the value of the terminal. Morgan have started looking more seriously at ways to chip away at their annual Bloomberg bills.
Specialized alternatives are cropping up for a fraction of the cost, while the financial industry as a whole moves away from the traders reliant on the terminal and towards high frequency trading & automation. Very few Bloomberg Terminal users use more than a “small percentage” of the thousands of functions available through it, according to Fortune.Ī handful of the several thousand analysis functions available for use through the Bloomberg Terminal. The following year, general spending on financial market data and analysis rose to a record $28.5B, while Bloomberg lost market share, according to the Financial Times. In 2016, sales of the Bloomberg Terminal dropped for the second time ever. At the same time, Bloomberg’s share of that market shrank.īloomberg’s weaknesses have become increasingly more apparent. Reporting on the news, doing research, and other unprofitable lines of business are tolerable for Bloomberg if they can deliver value to terminal users.ĭuring 2017, general spending on financial market data and analysis rose 3.6% to a record $28.5 billion. The revenue Bloomberg drives from these other lines of business, however, is negligible when compared to the terminal.