The OpenID Foundation is pleased to welcome Bloomberg as its newest member. Bloomberg, a global leader in business and financial information, brings a wealth of expertise and a strong commitment to advancing open identity standards that will benefit the entire community.

A perfect alignment of mission and values

Bloomberg has built its reputation by delivering trusted data, news, and insights that help bring transparency, efficiency, and fairness to global financial markets. This mission aligns perfectly with the OpenID Foundation’s commitment to creating identity standards that are secure, interoperable, and privacy preserving. 

Bloomberg's focus on helping connect influential communities across the global financial sector through reliable technology solutions resonates with the Foundation’s vision of enabling networks of networks to interoperate globally.

And collaboration is a key focus for Bloomberg. Recognizing that varied perspectives drive better outcomes, this philosophy makes Bloomberg an ideal partner in the community.

Leading through directed funding

The OpenID Foundation is delighted that Bloomberg has begun its membership with an instant commitment to contributing directed funding, specifically for AuthZEN development. AuthZEN addresses a fundamental challenge in modern enterprise security - how to make instant, accurate authorization decisions in zero-trust cloud architectures.

“At Bloomberg, we’ve embraced an open source-first tech stack in which we employ hundreds of different open source projects to power the complex pipelines, workloads, and applications our engineering and product teams are building,” said Phil Vachon, Head of Infrastructure in the Office of the CTO at Bloomberg. “An open standard like AuthZEN will only make it easier for a firm like ours to quickly plug in new open source projects that introduce new capabilities and functionality into our distributed infrastructure at scale.”

Bloomberg’s investment will support crucial conformance test development and an upcoming interoperability event at Gartner Identity and Access Management Summit 2025 (December 8-10, 2025). These are essential components for driving standards adoption and ensuring seamless implementation across the industry.

Directed funding represents a strategic mechanism whereby the OpenID Foundations members can advance the mission by making contributions designated for specific projects that benefit the Foundations and its entire membership. 

All work products and deliverables resulting from directed funding will be subject to the OpenID Foundation’s IPR Policy and made freely available to the community. This ensures that no single organization restricts access to or use of these influential  security standards.

Driving standards forward

"Bloomberg's enthusiasm to lead and their commitment to directed funding for AuthZEN will accelerate conformance test development and interoperability capabilities," said Gail Hodges, Executive Director of the OpenID Foundation. "Its investment demonstrates how industry leaders can drive meaningful progress in open standards. We look forward to its team’s contributions to our working groups and leadership in driving adoption of these important  standards that will benefit the entire community."

About the OpenID Foundation

The OpenID Foundation (OIDF) is a global open standards body committed to helping people assert their identity wherever they choose. Founded in 2007, we are a community of technical experts leading the creation of open identity standards that are secure, interoperable, and privacy preserving. The Foundation’s OpenID Connect standard is now used by billions of people across millions of applications. In the last five years, the Financial Grade API has become the standard of choice for Open Banking and Open Data implementations, allowing people to access and share data across entities. Today, the OpenID Foundation’s standards are the connective tissue to enable people to assert their identity and access their data at scale, the scale of the internet, enabling “networks of networks” to interoperate globally. Individuals, companies, governments and non-profits are encouraged to join or participate. Find out more at openid.net.