Reuters has been trying to topple Bloomberg relentlessly for years. Although they managed to reach feature parity with them on the content, data & analytics and

Reuters has been trying to topple Bloomberg relentlessly for years. Although they managed to reach feature parity with them on the content, data & analytics and communications(BB Chat vs. Reuters Messaging) on most of the asset classes they continued to loose even at FX where they are the strongest: Bloomberg at its core is a communications company and Reuters didn't manage to break into the most valuable part of their community i.e. buy side. Buy side, asset management companies like hedge funds, pension funds, has be the target audience for any startups so that sell side companies would flock into the systems for creating transactions. The term flocking must be taken literally as buy side doesn't have time to wait around to find their favorite counterparts. The easiest(!) way to achieve this is to create JV's with financial institutions which is exactly what Markit did - founded in 2003 - reached $1B and 3000+ employees in 2013 BB can only be toppled by breaking into the buy side community and getting the backing of some of the key players on the sell side. Would they care? Absolutely, as they hate the fact that they have no negotiation power over their data & terminal spend with BB. The cost of maintaining BB terminals is definitely not a noise or a friction of their expenses as some commenters suggested: At every market downturn trading desks are asked to slash terminal costs by deciding between the terminals(BB vs. Reuters) or start sharing terminals. With Reuters banks could negotiate contracts. However with BB they can't negotiate at all as they absolutely own the community.