Jamie Dimon may be pulling the plug on Bloomberg terminals, unless he can get a deal.
The JPMorgan Chase CEO is preparing to rip out thousands of its $21,000-a-year Bloomberg terminals over the coming two or three years, which may crimp the private financial data company that’s made Mike Bloomberg one of the world’s richest men, The Post has learned exclusively.
The New York-based bank is in the midst of negotiating contracts with Thomson Reuters — Bloomberg’s main competitor — to replace at least 1,000 to 2,000 terminals worldwide during the next two years, according to a person directly familiar with the company’s plans.
“Unseating the incumbent is never an easy thing,” Kevin McPartland, a Greenwich Associates analyst who covers both Bloomberg and Reuters, told The Post.
But, McPartland added, “[Reuters] put a ton of time and money into the platform.”
The potential switch-over to Reuters’ own version of the terminal, called Eikon, comes as Wall Street’s biggest banks are getting deeper into cost-cutting.
Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley are all said to be considering deep cuts in their terminal subscriptions, some as much as 25 percent, sources said.
JPMorgan is Bloomberg’s second-biggest client, with more than 10,000 subscriptions, sources said. The shift to Reuters is projected to save the company between $18 million and $36 million a year.
JPMorgan wouldn’t force anyone to give up their terminal if it was absolutely needed, and the changes wouldn’t affect most people working in investment banking or asset management, one source said.
The change could mark a seismic shift on Wall Street, which has struggled to free itself from Bloomberg’s clunky, expensive terminals but has found few viable alternatives. In addition to a news service, the company is a hub for bond prices and other, more obscure financial data.
Bloomberg is the 37th-largest private company in the US and pulls in more than $9 billion in annual revenue, according to Forbes’ 2015 ranking.
The central position that the company occupies has made Michael Bloomberg the world’s 10th-richest man, with a net worth of $39.3 billion, according to Forbes.
While JPMorgan mulls pulling away from Bloomberg, doing so wouldn’t cripple the data company, which has more than 327,000 subscribers.
While the company had record revenue and subscribers last year, Bloomberg is selective with its financial information and doesn’t release expenses or profits.
Tensions have been simmering between Bloomberg and JPMorgan for years.
In 2011, Bloomberg ran a story that compared the bank to Nazis over a debt deal gone bad. Two years later, The Post first broke the news that Bloomberg reporters had used the terminal to snoop on bankers’ whereabouts by employing terminal functions that weren’t available to other users.
Spokespeople for Bloomberg, JPMorgan and Reuters declined to comment.