Bloomberg becomes latest OpenID Foundation member

Bloomberg is joining the global open identity standards body OpenID Foundation (OIDF) with a plan to support the development of its AuthZEN project, focusing on standardizing authorization protocols.

The financial news and data company has pledged to contribute directed funding to AuthZEN, which aims to deliver “instant, accurate authorization decisions in zero-trust cloud architectures.”

While Bloomberg is mostly known for its news offerings among the general public, the firm has been developing technology solutions geared at the global financial sector.

The company has already embraced an open source-first tech stack, which is now being used for hundreds of open source projects, according to Phil Vachon, the company’s Head of Infrastructure in the Office of the CTO. The firm is also participating in and supporting 26 technology community organizations and open source foundations, with OpenID the latest to join.

Bloomberg’s funding will support conformance test development for AuthZEN, according to its announcement.

“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,” Vachon says.

Aside from its development, Bloomberg is also supporting AuthZEN’s presentation at next week’s Gartner Identity and Access Management Summit 2025.

During the interoperability event, implementers will showcase how an “AuthZEN search request to compliant PDPs is used during the authentication process to enrich identity tokens issued by the IdP with custom claims.”

Article Topics

authorization  |  AuthZEN  |  Bloomberg  |  digital identity  |  open source  |  open standards  |  OpenID Foundation