Global data and trading-platform provider Bloomberg has introduced its first portfolio of available alternative data sets on the vendor’s Bloomberg Enterprise Access Point.

The 20 new data sets are in addition to the data sets that Bloomberg included when it launched Bloomberg Enterprise Access Point in September 2018, Gerard Francis, global head of enterprise data at Bloomberg, told Markets Media.

“It’s not the number itself that is important, but the fact that we now have a framework where clients can access standardized and normalized data sets without signing contracts with the individual providers,” he said.

The most recent data vendors to join the Bloomberg ecosystem include 280First, Apptopia, Evaluate, Orbital Insight, OWL Analytics, Predata, PredictWallStreet, RS Metrics, Symphony Pharma, Thasos, and TipRanks.

However, Francis plans to roll out a few additional data sets every month.

“I expect that over 2019, we will have about 100 data sets up on the platform that people will be trying out,” he added.

Of the roughly 20 data sets available on the Bloomberg Enterprise Access Point, there is no common theme among the offerings.

The alternative data space is a wide spectrum of offerings and providers that may quickly move to the mainstream or remain in the alternative data space, Francis noted.

“People care about where they can get a signal,” he said. “If they have data sets that are easy to ingest and that provide a signal then they will use those data sets.”

Bloomberg performs an initial normalization of any new data set to ensure that it can be delivered via its Hypermedia API but leaves it to the data providers to clean and normalize their offerings.

“What we do not do is try to normalize the vendor’s data because in the alternative data space a lot of the value lies in the format of the raw data,” said Francis. “We do not interfere with any of that. We pass it on to the clients, and they can extract the value.”