In His Own Words: Q&A with Bloomberg Cofounder Thomas Secunda

Editor's Note: Like most companies during the most recent financial crisis, Bloomberg's business took a hit. In order to weather the storm, Bloomberg found creative ways to provide value to clients and to increase the utilization of Bloomberg's products and features with existing clients.

What are your biggest challenges here at Bloomberg?

Secunda: What am I worried about? We have to continually grow and reinvent ourselves. Like everybody else, we face a tremendous amount of unexpected things, whether regulation or new technology. We lost business during the slowdown, but by August of last year we were back to all-time record highs. We have more than 300,000 units out there, but the number of people using our system is even higher than that. We saw the downturn coming and we went to our customers and said, "Look, you could be a lot more productive with the Bloomberg." Our customers looking to see how we could save them money. They were worried about keeping their jobs and keeping their firms profitable. And they were worried about weathering this bad time, for however long it took, because nobody knew how long it was going to take. So we pivoted, and we came up with something we called the Bloomberg Value Solution. Instead of going out and talking to our customers about buying more, we talked to them about how they could actually save money by doing more on the Bloomberg terminals they already had. For example, we worked with exchange fees that people pay for on Bloomberg. There were many firms out there using some exchanges that were really expensive. For a big firm, we could save them around a half-million dollars. We did that on our own initiative, and we saved our customers money.

Often IT departments and market data departments are switching people from desk to desk and it's hard to keep up with who's entitled to what. So we wrote a program, and we said, "Look, if you're an active user of Bloomberg for 60 days and you never once looked at a real-time price for this exchange, we'd automatically turn you off." There were some graphics packages out there that were really excellent and some did things we didn't, but were much more expensive. We built a group that enhanced our graphics offering. Then, customers saw that our graphics did the same thing, so they were able to discontinue the other service, as they could do the same thing on their Bloomberg at no extra cost. One Bloomberg function is EVTS for events, which tells you who's out there speaking and when. We journal it as they speak, put up a cleaner version later and often have audio content. Before this, people were paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month for a similar service, so we went and did it. We've hired programmers, business managers and salespeople to show our customers how to use it. That's big, because if you didn't expect it to be on Bloomberg you wouldn't know to look for it. Now, if you want to find events, they are there. We did all of these things and we were able to save our customers significant amounts of money, not by discounting our service, but making our product more valuable. We've continued to do that. Greg MacSweeney is editorial director of InformationWeek Financial Services, whose brands include Wall Street & Technology, Bank Systems & Technology, Advanced Trading, and Insurance & Technology. View Full Bio

3 of 6