AI’s Got a New Finance Job: Replacing Your Bloomberg Terminal
Just when you thought AI had disrupted all possible industries, Anthropic dropped Claude for Financial Services. Suddenly, that $25K-a-year Bloomberg Terminal feels outdated.
What Makes Claude for Financial Services Stand Out
Claude now integrates external market data from sources like S&P, FactSet, and Morningstar with internal firm data platforms such as Databricks and Snowflake. This lets analysts ask complex questions like “How did our tech portfolio perform vs. the S&P 500 tech sector?” without manually digging through multiple systems.
Need Monte Carlo simulations or proprietary trading models? Claude Code handles these tasks efficiently, offering expanded usage limits for crunch time before earnings calls. Forget piecing together APIs—Claude arrives with pre-built MCP connectors ready to plug into your existing financial data infrastructure.
Its higher token limits—well beyond the regular 200K-token or roughly 500-page cap—allow processing massive 10-K filings and deal documents without hitting bottlenecks during critical deadlines.
Who’s Already On Board?
- Bridgewater reports a 20% productivity boost.
- Norway’s sovereign wealth fund (NBIM) saved 213,000 work hours.
- AIG cut underwriting review time by a factor of five.
Claude Sonnet 4 scored 44.5% accuracy on complex financial analyst tasks in the latest Finance Agent Benchmark, matching OpenAI’s o3. For context, most models fall below 30%. This isn’t about fetching simple stock prices—it’s multi-step SEC filing analysis that even junior analysts find tough.
Other Contenders in the Financial AI Space
Perplexity is another key player, focusing on individual analysts with three offerings:
- Perplexity Finance ($0): Free real-time stock prices, company analysis, and 13F comparisons featuring a clean, intuitive UI.
- Enterprise for Financial Services ($40/month): FactSet integration plus industry research. Teams save 10+ hours per employee weekly. One analyst praised how it compressed 48 hours of Q4 earnings research into just 2 minutes.
- Perplexity Labs ($20/month): Custom dashboards and deep research reports in under 10 minutes. Notably, Stanley Druckenmiller used Perplexity to spot the top five Argentine ADRs, bought them all, and watched his positions grow significantly.
The Crypto Angle
Perplexity recently partnered with Coinbase to integrate real-time crypto data. Phase one delivered COIN50 index prices within Perplexity’s Comet browser. Phase two will enable direct queries connected to Coinbase trading.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong envisions crypto wallets fully integrated into AI models, promising “another 10x unlock” for AI. Imagine asking your AI to not just analyze Bitcoin but actually purchase it on your behalf. While this raises obvious risks, it also addresses the challenge of tracking a 24/7 crypto market.
Why This Matters to Finance Professionals
About 70% of U.S. stock trading already runs through AI algorithms. This shift isn’t about replacing analysts but upgrading their toolkits. Claude’s strengths include enterprise-grade security, institutional data integration, and powerful coding tools to build custom solutions. Perplexity shines with accessibility, user experience, and flexible dashboards.
At $20–40/month compared to Bloomberg’s roughly $25K/year, these platforms open AI-powered financial tools to a broader audience—yet financial pros are already adopting them.
Final Thoughts
The tangle of financial data is finally getting an upgrade. AI has powered trading for years; now it’s helping decide what to trade.
Those late nights slogging through 10-Ks might soon be a thing of the past. Eventually, agentic trading tools accessible to everyone could let you instruct an AI to manage your portfolio—buy, hold, sell, and optimize returns while flagging potential mistakes.
While on-demand AI financial advisors for everyday investors are still a few years away, the immediate impact is clear: The Bloomberg Terminal could soon be Bloomberg toast. Not because these new tools are flawless, but because they solve the core problem—making financial data truly usable.
Your membership also unlocks:
