Many exchanges charge their own additional fees for access to real time price feeds across the terminal.

[5] Using this money, Bloomberg, having designed in-house computerized financial systems for Salomon, set up a data services company named Innovative Market Systems (IMS) based on his belief that Wall Street would pay a premium for high-quality business information, delivered instantly on computer terminals in a variety of usable formats.

[6] The company sold customized computer terminals that delivered real-time market data, financial calculations and other analytics to Wall Street firms.

Michael Bloomberg stepped away from working on the terminal in 2001 to run for New York City mayor, but returned to lead the project in 2014.

Starting in 2012, Bloomberg Terminal had a greater annual revenue than Thomson Reuters, the company that founded the market data business.

The client, used by end users to interact with the system, is a Windows application that typically connects directly through a router provided by Bloomberg and installed on-site.

End users can also make use of an extra service (Bloomberg Anywhere) to allow the Windows application to connect via internet/IP, or Web access via a Citrix client.

The ↵ Enter key is referred to as GO with a green color, deriving from the Monopoly game board, by passing Go and collecting $200 in a hope that the user could make money on the information he would find.

The yellow hotkeys along the top of the keyboard are used to enter market sectors, and are generally used as suffixes to allow the terminal to correctly identify a security.

This use of multiple screens with user-demanded, specific pieces of differing data—across all relevant markets—allows the user to view diverse and countless volumes of information in real-time.

The stated goals of this multi-year, $100 million project were to improve the discoverability and usability of the Core Terminal's functionality.

To turn on Launchpad the command {BLP GO} is used, {PDFB GO} allows users to set Lpad to open automatically on login.

The Bloomberg Terminal installation ships with Excel add-ins which facilitate building spreadsheets which consume market data.

[25] In April 2022, Bloomberg released the Common Data Format 3.1 for Legal Entity Identifiers and received accreditation as an LEI issuer for funds, a move which would allow firms to better understand their exposure to different types of legal entities and meet regulatory requirements.

The largest competitor to the Bloomberg Terminal is Refinitiv with its Eikon offering, formerly owned by Thomson Reuters.

Other major competitors include Money.Net, SIX Financial Information, Markit, FactSet Research Systems, Capital IQ, Fidessa and Dow Jones.

According to Burton-Taylor International Consulting,[28] the market for financial data and analytics was worth almost $25 billion as of 2011[update].