Sell-Side Technology Awards 2014: Best Data Provider to the Sell Side — Thomson Reuters

The Sell-Side Technology Awards judges determined that, over the last year, Thomson Reuters hit that sweet spot square in the middle. Activ Financial’s win in this category last year, the award’s inaugural year, took many by surprise, considering the relative market cap of the nominees. This year’s result will raise far fewer eyebrows.

Following a bumpy launch in 2010, Thomson Reuters Eikon, its flagship desktop front-office platform, tripled its user base in 2013, and claimed 122,000 subscribers as of Dec. 31. Among those were the European Central Bank, 18 participating European national central banks, and 18 government organizations and central banks across Asia-Pacific. As part of an increased hosting footprint in Asia-Pacific, Thomson Reuters launched Elektron Managed Services, the cloud service for its suite of data and analytics tools, in Shanghai, Sydney, and Taiwan, adding to previous launches in Hong Kong, Mumbai, Singapore, and Tokyo. It also launched its Elektron Real Time consolidated feed in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sydney.

Ease of navigation through modern search technology has been a focus of Eikon. Semantic search was introduced in 2012; graph search technology in early 2014.

“With graph search, we’re essentially navigating someone through the search process,” says Philip Brittan, CTO and global head of platform. “Graph search helps our Eikon users build questions by providing suggestions of what they may be looking for—similar to if you were typing in a Google search bar and you saw a list of possible terms to add to build out or complete your search. If you were looking for, say, a spread between the US 10- and 30-year benchmark, then graph search helps you build the question, and clicking on the suggested search option takes you immediately to the relevant spread chart.”

Other additions in the last year include Eikon’s Power Curve for commodities, a visual display that combines power supply data with real-time fuel prices, weather, available capacity information, and proprietary supply and demand models. In equities, Eikon added social media and sentiment-monitoring tools, using a system of sentiment scoring to provide a rolling average score for positive and negative news, and Twitter sentiment across over 30,000 listed companies.

Ease of navigation through modern search technology has been a focus of Eikon. Semantic search was introduced in 2012; graph search technology in early 2014.