SIX is adopting Bloomberg's Open Symbology (BSYM), an open and free-use system for identifying global securities across all asset classes with a BBGID, a 12- digit alpha-numeric identifier for financial instruments. SIX has a long history of supporting existing and emerging standards and already supports more than 30 security identification schemes.

Adding the BSYM was a natural extension to the sets already available in VDF, a fully structured and encoded data feed offering near-real time delivery of reference data. BSYM is also scheduled to be released in MDF, a high performance, real-time market data delivery service by the end of February 2014.

The covered asset classes include:
• Bonds, debt-registered claims
• Hybrid, structured instruments
• Floating rate notes, debentures with variable, graduated or index
linked interest
• Convertible bonds
• Money market instruments, with a term of less than a year
• Trust-certificates, funds unites
• Trust shares
• Shares, units, participation receipts

"Integration of the Bloomberg's Open Symbology is extremely important to us in our effort to continuously improve our products, ensuring client needs are met while increasing our customer focused offering," said Arno Wilhelm, Head Product Management, SIX Financial Information. "The addition of Bloomberg's Symbology to our portfolio advances straight-through processing, allowing for ever more efficient mapping and cross-referencing of instruments, saving clients time and money."

Peter Warms, global product manager for entity content, corporate actions and symbology said, "Bloomberg and SIX Financial Information recognize the value of a comprehensive, open and unchanging identifier, like the BBGID, which helps market systems and customers track unique securities and process corporate action data more efficiently. Adopting BSYM for several of its market data feeds will help SIX Financial Information and its customers enhance the interoperability of market systems and reduce operational costs."

BSYM covers more than 150 million securities representing all asset classes. New identifiers are available through Bloomberg's website at no charge to users.