Anna Khan May 2018 Bessemer Venture Partners

1. Bloomberg Alt Roadmap
Anna Khan
May 2018
Bessemer Venture Partners

2. Bloomberg, The $46B software company you don’t know about
$24k 200mm 30k
annual price
per user
daily messages
sent
terminal
functions
*Bloomberg is a private company so there are limited confirmed and up to date statistics. The data in this deck has come from multiple sources that are good estimates but not confirmed.

3. Famously averse to discounting, despite scale
*Bloomberg is a private company so there are limited confirmed and up to date statistics. The data in this deck has come from multiple sources that are good estimates but not confirmed.

4. All-in-one pricing leads to bullet proof bundling
• Customers cannot pay for one
module that they use more than
others.
• Customers may use only a fraction
of the modules, but have to pay the
full price.
• Many banks feel this is
unsustainable given the financial
industries last few years hard-hit with
regulation.

5. …but financial downturns have impacted growth
• Terminal subscriptions grew steeply till
2007 to ~270,000.
• Financial crisis led to slowed growth as
several big customers trimmed
budgets or went under.
• Today terminals remain steady at
325,000 but have grown only 1.9% in
2015 drastically diff from its 12%
annual growth rate pre-fin crisis.
• Gathering data from several press
reports led to an estimated revenue of
~$7.9B in 2013 and $9B in 2014.
*Bloomberg is a private company so there are limited confirmed and up to date statistics. The data in this deck has come from multiple sources that are good estimates but not confirmed.

6. Legacy competitors try to chip away, but are unsuccessful
• Thomson Reuters and Dow Jones
are the largest and most direct
competitors.
• Dow Jones launched a product called
DJX that they pitch to individual
investors – which offers a Bloomberg-
like terminal at a fraction of the price. It
has received limited traction.
• Despite large competitors and financial
downturns – Bloomberg is still valued at
roughly 4-5x revenue like the public
markets.

7. Bloomberg Complete Suite; Very Feature Rich
Markets Commodites Derivatives Equities Fixed
Income
Solutions Asset Mgmt Credit Education Hedge
Funds
Invt
Banking
Invt
Relations
Private
Equity
Emerging
Markets
Family
Offices
Tools Charts Collab Custom
Desktop
Execution Hardware Analytics Mobile
News Bloomberg
Intelligence
News Economics Research

8. Core Use Cases – Where will the disruption come from?
Messaging News Stock Quotes
• In-house solutions for large
banks like Goldman
• Symphony which is a
consortium of top banks
• Text messaging
• Free services like
Whatsapp/Slack
• Alternate news channels
• Automating aggregation
of news
• Yahoo Finance
• Mobile adoption

9. What stands in the way of reinvention?
• First-mover advantage
• Customers are used to the Bloomberg product
• High brand value
• 325k subscriptions globally, 19k+ employees
• Upfront hardware investment
• Banks traditionally slow to adopt new software
• Terminal updates happen every 2-3 years and sales cycles will
be long
• Long-term data + in-house intelligence
• Bloomberg tracks all terminal actions and can use this data to
improve the product over time
• If a real competitor steps up – Bloomberg could manipulate data
providers and block access to others
• Value proposition of in-house intelligence will be hard to replicate

10. Some inevitable cracks, with privacy concerns reported
• After numerous customer complaints,
Bloomberg tapered data access to
2,400 Bloomberg reporters. But
19,000 Bloomberg employees still
have access to all terminal actions.
• Larger customers like Goldman have
openly commented on trying to build
their own internal messaging platform
for privacy concerns.
*SOURCE: www.bloomberg.com

11. Market Map / Areas of Interest
Social/Communication Financial Data/News
Trading AnalyticsBespoke

12. Future of Bloomberg: Wider and Deeper
• Wants to expand to new markets/verticals – specifically legal research
through its $990M acquisition of legal research house BNA.
• Now head to head with competitors like LexisNexis and WestLaw
(owned by TR)
• Government is another interesting vertical they are targeting through the
launch of the Bloomberg Government subscription service.
• Competitive intel on government contractors
• Research on a bill
• Database on associations and lobbying firms
• Interestingly, this isn’t limiting growth in the finance vertical – Bloomberg plans
to provide more services such as trading and industry research. ~85-90%
of rev still comes from core financial product.
• CRM development: Large banks use archaic CRMs to input information from
traders on sales calls. Because most of the institutions already live in
Bloomberg – they could easily develop a CRM which would become a system
of record and harder to fight longer term.
*Bloomberg is a private company so there are limited confirmed and up to date statistics. The data in this deck has come from multiple sources that are good estimates but not confirmed.

13. Thank You
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