About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Bloomberg Opens Up Market Data Interfaces

Subscribe to our newsletter

As anticipated, Bloomberg is opening up the interface via which it provides market data to other market data and application vendors, on a free-use basis. It’s part of the vendor’s Open Market Data Initiative, which also extends to market data symbology, as previously announced.

The interface in play is BLPAPI, which is already widely used by Bloomberg customers.  Now, it’s available to non-customers under what the company terms an “MIT-style license that allows users to copy and use BLPAPI interfaces for use with any market data service, applications or adapter technology.” That license is available at http://open.bloomberg.com.

Says Bloomberg CTO Shawn Edwards: “We intend to evolve BLPAPI into an open standard with the help of an independent committee charged with managing the future development and stability of a truly open market data interface.”

BLPAPI provides a consistent interface to data, from high volume low-latency trades and quotes to end-of-day reference data. A technical definition document is available, and the interface itself works with applications written in Java, C, C++, .NET, COM and Perl.

It’s yet to be seen how popular Bloomberg’s initiative will be – it’s hard to imagine Thomson Reuters adopting it, for example. But for niche market data vendors, for markets offering direct feeds, and for data feed management vendors – such as Exegy (which already interfaces to Bloomberg’s data feed) – it might be an attractive option to help sell into trading firms that are big Bloomberg customers.

Bloomberg isn’t the only game in the open market data game. Indeed there still exists the other Open Market Data Initiative, led by the Collaborative Software Institute (with support from Bank of America/Merrill Lynch), though this has been quiet for some time. Perhaps more of a challenge is the OpenMAMA initiative from NYSE Technologies – which might be perceived as more neutral than Bloomberg.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Unlocking value: Harnessing modern data platforms for data integration, advanced investment analytics, visualisation and reporting

4 September 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes Modern data platforms are bringing efficiencies, scalability and powerful new capabilities to institutions and their data pipelines. They are enabling the use of new automation and analytical technologies that are also helping firms to derive more value from their data and...

BLOG

LDA Technologies Launches NeoTap X and Neo X Timestamping and Tap Aggregation Solutions

LDA Technologies, the provider of ultra-low latency networking and FPGA technology, has introduced NeoTap X, a high-performance timestamping and tap aggregation solution designed to address the increasing data and compliance demands of capital markets. The new product is built on LDA’s Neo X FPGA platform, offering enhanced processing power and optimised resource efficiency for low-latency...

EVENT

RegTech Summit New York

Now in its 9th year, the RegTech Summit in New York will bring together the RegTech ecosystem to explore how the North American capital markets financial industry can leverage technology to drive innovation, cut costs and support regulatory change.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...