Waters Rankings 2017: Best Reference Data Provider—Thomson Reuters

The reference data landscape has shifted significantly as the industry draws closer to the implementation of the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid II) on January 3, 2018. Stuart Martin, managing director, risk information and learning services at Thomson Reuters, says that the regulation has put an extraordinary level of pressure on the industry’s capability to report reference data.

“It’s not just around liquidity, trading and best execution; firms will now have to actually provide a lot of referential content sets to the various reporting bodies and regulators, which has meant that Thomson Reuters has increased its output of capabilities over the last 18 months to support our customers,” says Martin. “But also, as we move toward Mifid II as a deadline in January 2018, there is a lot of new information that we need to build into databases and distribute to our customers as part of the directive. We’re now focused on building out new datasets, which didn’t previously exist to help our clients meet the level of detail that Mifid II demands.”

The vendor’s flagship data delivery platform, Datascope Select, and non-fixed income platform, Datascope Plus, have both been re-oriented to cope with the new demands of Mifid II-related data. Datascope Plus will operate as the platform that delivers bulk referential capabilities for Mifid II, while Datascope Select delivers data on a per-security or request–retrieval basis for customers that don’t want all of the data, but do require levels of the content based on investment profiles and obligations.

Thomson Reuters has also focused specifically on improving its fixed-income capabilities as a result of a number of market changes, including a sizeable level of acquisition activity by other vendors, particularly around bond data and analytics technologies. Martin says that Thomson Reuters has specifically opted not to follow suit in the fixed-income space, instead relying on its existing capabilities.

But Thomson Reuters has made a number of purchases this year, the most notable of which were its acquisitions of Clarient Global and Avox, subsidiaries of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. (DTCC), to further bolster its know your customer (KYC), client reference data and legal entity data capabilities.