The information giant faces the classic innovator's dilemma as rivals armed with cool new technologies try to disrupt the disrupter
In the twilight you probably would have missed him. In late 2012, at about 6:30 every weekday evening, a slight, compact bald man in his 50s would emerge from the shadow of the tower on Manhattan’s East Side that houses Bloomberg LP, the world’s largest financial data provider. Dressed in triathlon gear, he’d perform some short stretches, then slip quietly away into the streets leading west. It was an unassuming afterwork routine for a man faced with a difficult task.
Earlier that year Stanley Young — fitness fanatic, financial technology veteran and former member of the British Army’s Special Forces — had been hired away from NYSE Euronext, where he’d spent more than three years as head of the exchange operator’s technology division, to manage Bloomberg’s enterprise data business. Great hopes were invested in Young. Bloomberg had risen to the pinnacle of the financial data industry on the back of its fabled desktop terminal, a one-stop, perma-blinking information pleasure dome encompassing data, news, analytics and much, much more — the financial product world’s answer to the Broadway show. But the company that Michael Bloomberg famously founded in 1982 with a $10 million severance check from Salomon Brothers recognized that the financial industry was changing and that it would have to adapt to survive: As Wall Street cut jobs and embraced greater automation, the model of a fixed-price, all-encompassing black-box terminal, installed at great cost on a financial professional’s desk, had a limited shelf life.
The terminal was, and still is, Bloomberg’s lifeblood. More than 80 percent of 2013 revenue came from the service, which the firm sells to customers for a flat fee of about $20,000 a year. Pivoting away from the terminal while doing nothing to damage the rivers of gold it diverted into the company’s balance sheet was sure to be tricky. Young was brought in to manage that transition by building up Bloomberg’s presence in direct, open feeds, à la carte data provision and in-firm data management — in other words, every part of the data world that exists outside the serene and closed ecosystem of the terminal. Evening runs in Central Park were his therapy.
But less than a year after joining Bloomberg, Young was gone. “Stanley Young joined Bloomberg to help broaden our enterprise offerings and strategy,” a statement by the company announced in May 2013. “We are grateful to Stanley for his contributions and wish him well in his future endeavors.” Bloomberg insiders say Young’s time at the firm coincided with a “civil war” over how deep and significant the pivot toward the enterprise business would be. Vice chairman Thomas Secunda, one of four founding partners of the firm and current head of the financial products division, is known throughout the industry as Mr. Terminal.
“Tom’s a brilliant guy; he’s got a brain the size of a planet,” says one former Bloomberg senior executive. “But everything he does is colored by the desire to see everything on the terminal. He has great ideas, but they all lead back to the terminal. If you want to access new functionality, if you want to access product innovation at Bloomberg, it’s $20,000 a year to buy the terminal subscription, and that’s nonnegotiable. There’s no other way in.”
Gerard Francis, a Bloomberg lifer who has been at the company for more than two decades and previously served as Secunda’s chief of staff, replaced Young. The Englishman’s exit and the appointment of Francis at the helm of the enterprise group were largely interpreted by insiders as a sign that, in the civil war over the fate of the Bloomberg data business, the status quo — the terminal and Mr. Terminal — had won. Francis laughs off this suggestion. “There’s nothing further from the truth than that statement,” he tells Institutional Investor. “That’s a little strong.”
The news of Young’s departure was lost amid the furor that erupted at about the same time over revelations that reporters from Bloomberg’s news division had improperly accessed data related to clients’ terminal usage to generate stories. But in the grand narrative of Bloomberg’s future as a financial data company, Young’s failure to break the primacy of the terminal at the heart of the firm’s business model was a much more significant event. Now, with finance undergoing deep currents of change and many critics questioning whether Bloomberg’s terminal obsession will allow it to remain relevant into the next decade, the financial data giant is fighting harder than ever to repel a growing army of would-be disrupters....MUCH MORE
