Today, the Bloomberg Terminal uses an array of data science tools and techniques – including machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP) - to separate signals from noise and surface valuable insights to financial professionals. Whether that data includes foot-traffic in retail outlets collected from FourSquare or the path of merchant ships collected from satellite, it all needs to come together in an accessible manner via the Bloomberg interface. “We’re enabling our clients to interact with our data in a quantitative kind of way.”

“Finance as a whole is becoming more programmatic, more machine-driven, less about working from your gut, more about very careful data analysis,” he says. The second driver is the changing face of finance. “If we hadn’t kept pace with the growth of information, then our clients would be feeling even more behind where they needed to be.” “It would have been feasible to just scan all the relevant newspaper headlines, but they can’t anymore,” he says. First, the amount of data that’s accessible has increased exponentially, Mann says. Two big things have changed over the last five years that have impacted how Bloomberg builds its terminal. “There are so many things that happen in the real world that are relevant to our customers that machine learning is increasingly a phenomenal tool for structuring and normalizing that information,” Mann says. With about 325,000 users globally and subscriptions that reportedly cost about $20,000 per year, the product generates enough revenue to keep thousands of programmers and data scientists busy building ever more intelligence into the system.īloomberg’s Head of Data Science, Gideon Mann, recently talked with Datanami about the data science technologies and techniques that go into keeping the terminal on the cutting edge of information delivery in the big data era.

Since Michael Bloomberg launched it back in 1982, the terminal has become a must-have tool for investors who need to track news, stocks, and market-changing events in real time. The Bloomberg Terminal is no ordinary data product. While its amber-on-black text interface evokes a 1990s-era Unix vibe, the data science behind the scenes is definitely cutting edge. When it comes to financial data, you can’t find a more recognizable product than the Bloomberg Terminal, which is used by hundreds of thousands of financial professionals around the world.

Bloomberg terminal database