Bloomberg Debuts ‘Data License Plus’ to Aid Data Management During Covid-19

Data giant Bloomberg will today unveil a new tool, Data License Plus (DL+), which enables data professionals to search, interact with, and view granular information about market, reference, and pricing data being consumed by their organizations via Bloomberg.

The vendor originally planned to roll out DL+ by the end of this year, but accelerated development after realizing how useful it could prove to staff at financial institutions working from home during the coronavirus outbreak, who need to understand the datasets being fed into different applications used across their firms.

Specifically, Bloomberg realized that its new web interface could prove especially useful to data management professionals, because it collects and links all data within Bloomberg’s Data License offering, and makes it available in an easy-to-navigate and search web interface. Gerard Francis, global head of enterprise data at Bloomberg, says the primary beneficiary of DL+ will be data operations professionals who in the past may have needed to invest significant time in cleaning data and creating linkages between companies and their issued securities, ratings on those companies, and price data across all the markets a company might trade on.

The home screen of the DL+ web interface lists the real-time status of all back-office and per-security updates currently taking place in a firm’s systems, such as the time a process was started, current status, and whether it completed successfully or not. Clicking on a process displays the “flight plan” for each, which shows a granular representation of the steps within each process. Other screens show lists of processes scheduled to take place each day.

From a toolbar on the web interface’s home screen, users can pick a “Finder’s Catalogue”, which allows them to search for and select data on a company by choosing from broad headings such as Investment Masters, Legal Entity, and Price Master—the content of which is all interlinked so users can easily browse it, jump between datasets, and filter by industry, ticker, and other factors using drop-down menus to find the data they’re looking for.

“DL+ will look at the datasets that clients take, and combine those into one big dataset that is linked, joined up, with traceability, and which is usable from the get-go,” Francis says. Indeed, the original rationale for DL+ was not Covid-related, but was rather aimed at introducing a managed service that would make it easier for firms to consolidate, understand, and use its data—challenges that will exist beyond the Coronavirus and current work-from-home measures.

“When we designed this solution, Covid didn’t exist. So the problem we’re solving for clients is taking away a lot of work that they previously had to do…. DL+ is a service concept that will make a significant difference to clients’ data workflow, and will make compliance and operational issues so much simpler,” he says.

The WFH Experiment

Francis says the process of accelerating the development and release of DL+ was not a major challenge for Bloomberg, as the vendor was already well equipped to operate on a distributed model and to continue its product development activities in spite of coronavirus-related quarantining measures.

“We’ve traditionally have the ability to work from home, but have never done it at scale. So it has been a bit of an experiment for us,” Francis says. “But we had good videoconferencing, good desktops… and were able to adapt pretty quickly, so we were able to change with no slippage. And because we use continuous deployment, we’re used to continuously deploying software.”