Bloomberg, the news and market data vendor, is opening its market data interfaces for use by technology professionals globally, free of charge and restriction, it has announced.

The US firm’s application programming interface, known as BLPAPI, is used daily by more than 100,000 professionals across the financial services industry and is now publicly available under a free-use licence.

BLPAPI powers global market data distribution to desktops, workgroups and enterprise applications. In addition to Bloomberg Professional service subscribers, non-Bloomberg customers, vendors and software developers can now use BLPAPI as an alternative to proprietary technologies for market data distribution.

The firm has described the move as an attempt to support what it calls the Open Market Data Initiative - an effort to embrace and promote open solutions for the financial services industry.