SIX Financial Information’s Valordata Feed (VDF) and Market Data Feed (MDF) will incorporate the Bloomberg Global Identifier (BBGID), which delivers greater processing efficiencies and transparency to its clients.

SIX is adopting Bloomberg’s Open Symbology (BSYM), an open and free-use system for identifying global securities across all asset classes with a BBGID, a 12-digit alpha-numeric identifier for financial instruments. SIX has a long history of supporting existing and emerging standards and already supports more than 30 security identification schemes.

Adding the BSYM was a natural extension to the sets already available in VDF, a fully structured and encoded data feed offering near-real time delivery of reference data. BSYM is also scheduled to be released in MDF, a high performance, real-time market data delivery service by the end of February 2014.

“Integration of the Bloomberg’s Open Symbology is extremely important to us in our effort to continuously improve our products, ensuring client needs are met while increasing our customer focused offering,” said Arno Wilhelm, head of product management, SIX Financial Information. “The addition of Bloomberg’s Symbology to our portfolio advances straight-through processing, allowing for ever more efficient mapping and cross-referencing of instruments, saving clients time and money.”

The covered asset classes include bonds, debt-registered claims; hybrid, structured instruments; floating rate notes, debentures with variable, graduated or index linked interest; convertible bonds; and money market instruments.

“Bloomberg and SIX Financial Information recognize the value of a comprehensive, open and unchanging identifier, like the BBGID, which helps market systems and customers track unique securities and process corporate action data more efficiently,” said Peter Warms, global product manager for entity content, corporate actions and symbology at Bloomberg. “Adopting BSYM for several of its market data feeds will help SIX Financial Information and its customers enhance the interoperability of market systems and reduce operational costs.”

Many of the systems in use today across the securities industry have been built around proprietary, closed standards used to identify securities. Today, there are hundreds of such symbology sets, created by vendors, markets and the companies themselves.

In 2009, Bloomberg released BSYM, a system for identifying securities across all asset classes.
The symbology set encompass Bloomberg identifiers, symbols and high level reference data–the basic characteristics of a given financial instrument. BSYM covers more than 150 million securities representing all asset classes.

The centerpiece of the symbology initiative is Bloomberg Global Identifier (BBGID), a 12 character, alpha numeric code assigned to approximately 40 million unique instruments found in the global markets. Unlike other existing IDs, the BBGID does not change once assigned.