Further improving on its strengths in the bond data arena, Bloomberg has expanded its relationship with Standard & Poor’s Securities Evaluations group. The deal adds Standard & Poor’s municipal bond pricing, Municipal Benchmark Yield Curves and Municipal Total Return Index to the Bloomberg Professional service.
For Standard & Poor’s, the agreement opens up the distribution of this data to Bloomberg’s client base – which consists of approximately 250,000 users. Perhaps more significantly, it also makes the data available via the full range of Bloomberg’s sophisticated analytics for clients.
Says Katharina Voudouris, product manager for Standard & Poor’s securities evaluations, “This deal provides a valuable, additional way for our clients to access and utilize our municipal bond data.”
Previously, around 90,000 daily municipal bond prices from Standard & Poor’s have been available via Bloomberg. This deal expands the coverage significantly to 1.4 million daily prices, as well as adding the yield curves and indices data.
The data will be available on the desktop service for lookup and as part of a client’s portfolio-based data request. It can also be permissioned for users of Data License. Says J. R. Rieger, vice president of global evaluations at Standard & Poor’s, “We see this as a pipe into the Bloom-berg user base, regardless of how cli-ents then choose to access that data.”
Any users of the data via Bloom-berg will be required to have a direct agreement and license with Standard & Poor’s. Both vendors plan to work together to promote the availability of the bond data to the Bloomberg client base over the coming months.
According to Rieger, “We’ve been in discussions over the past couple of years with our clients and with Bloomberg. Through various user groups we received feedback that they would like us to help them by making it easier to access our data. In particular, many of the clients had expended much time and energy working with Bloomberg’s service. By deciding to make our full range of municipal data available on this platform, we are making our clients job’s easier and helping to provide a more complete range of data on Bloomberg.”
Standard & Poor’s believes that utilizing existing and new relationships for third parties will help to further expand the reach of its evaluations data. As such, it is working to identify more distribution opportunities with both vendors and service bureaus. Its data is already available via a number of partners including Reuters, through the EJV acquisition, and Telekurs Financial.
Standard & Poor’s also provides a range of data services for taxable fixed income securities in addition to the non-taxable municipal bonds it covers. In the bond evaluations space, the vendor competes primarily with FT Interactive Data and increasingly with Reuters (although Reuters sources municipal evaluations data from Standard & Poor’s), and Thomson Financial.
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