Bloomberg Offers End-to-End Financial Data, With a Little Partner Help

Two months after launching its managed Enterprise Data Management (EDM) service, Bloomberg PolarLake added credit rating data from Fitch Solutions to help managers better assess risk.

The new Bloomberg PolarLake EDM service manages, acquires and distributes financial data on a volume scale for financial institutions for trading support, to manage risk, and to meet regulations. With the Fitch data, these same clients can have a better view of their long-term risks. (Fitch Solutions, owned by the Hearst Corp. and Fimalac, distributes Fitch Ratings, as well as analytical and data tools aimed at the fixed-income area.)

"Credit and counterparty risk are critical issues for finance professionals, especially with many firms now facing new capital rules and requirements specifying how to benchmark investment portfolios and evaluate OTC-traded securities,” said John Randles, Chief Executive Officer of Bloomberg PolarLake. “The addition of Fitch's credit rating data into our EDM offering will help our clients make more informed risk-management and investment decisions going forward."

Bloomberg PolarLake was acquired last May by Bloomberg, which invested in the creation of the managed EDM service. The new service is built on Bloomberg’s existing managed services strengths and PolarLake’s data management software, which was originally an on-premises solution. “The managed service takes what people have done on premise and solves the data supply chain problems around EDM, such as multiple data sources, data management, exception handling and the crucial last mile of data distribution. Demand is escalating for a comprehensive service that reduces operational costs and standardizes data processing for global financial firms,” Randles said, in announcing the EDM service two months ago.

PolarLake is looking to team with an array of service providers to broaden its portfolio. And it hopes to take a lot of the grunt work out of managing this financial data. “The process of gathering and managing data is repeated over and over again across the industry. By doing this once, in one place, we can offer efficiencies and economies of scale,” Randle said. “For example, where there is a large data set, a firm is constantly loading data, parsing, exception handling and managing onboarding. We can do that centrally and the firm can focus its effort on adding value to the data.”


Edited by Rory J. Thompson