Bloomberg.com – New York – Bloomberg L.P. announced today that it has completed its acquisition of Barclays Risk Analytics and Index Solutions Ltd. (“BRAIS”) from Barclays PLC. The transaction includes the widely-used Barclays fixed income benchmark indices, BRAIS strategy indices, and the intellectual property of the POINT portfolio analytics solution. The benchmark indices will be co-branded “Bloomberg Barclays Indices” for an initial period of five years. Bloomberg will also act as the calculation agent for the Barclays quantitative investment strategy index business and Barclays strategy indices.
“Properly constructed benchmark and strategy indices, and state of the art analytics, continue to grow in importance to the investment community as the global markets evolve in a fast-changing regulatory environment,” said JP Zammitt, Bloomberg’s Global Head of Financial Products. “Bloomberg is committed to being at the forefront of these developments, and is well-positioned to grow and evolve the BRAIS business for a broader set of market participants than ever before, building on our strengths in fixed income data, analytics, distribution, technology, pricing and news.”
The acquisition enables Bloomberg to incorporate sophisticated models and analytics from POINT into Bloomberg PORT and augment these with data, news, alerts, mobile capabilities, and Bloomberg’s order management solutions to enhance the investment process and facilitate collaboration. Barclays has agreed to continue to operate POINT for 18 months post-completion to help clients transition.
A market-independent provider, Bloomberg continues to participate in the index business through the Bloomberg Commodity Index: BCOM (formerly the Dow Jones-UBS Commodity Index), and the Bloomberg AusBond Indices (formerly the UBS Australia Bond Index family). Bloomberg indices are aligned with the IOSCO principles for financial benchmarks, integrated with the company’s analytic dashboards, portfolio analytics, and evaluated pricing (BVAL) service, and connected to the trading workflow via order management and execution platforms.
“Fixed income investors have relied on the Barclays benchmark indices, and its predecessor for decades,” said Ken Volpert, Global Head of Bond Indexing for Vanguard. “With Bloomberg as a proven provider of data, analytics and pricing used every day by global investors and now an independent provider of these indices, we look forward to continuing to use these indices and to seeing how the index, risk analytics, and relative value tools will evolve in the years to come.”
