RBC Investments Doubles Thomson Installation

RBC Investments, the wealth management arm of Royal Bank of Canada, has begun rolling out 7,300 positions of the Thomson Workstation in an effort to consolidate its vendor contracts. The deal involves the renewal of 4,000 positions within RBC Dain Rauscher and the addition of 3,300 seats at RBC Investments in Canada.

John Truman, head of technology at RBC Investments, says that after buying Dain Rauscher in 2000, RBC wanted to consolidate the number of contracts it has across the US-Canada border and negotiate better deals. "The other thing we were looking for was a product that would meet our needs in terms of the overall network architecture and [give us] the ability to use our own network to distribute the feeds across Canada,"he says.

"[Thomson Workstation] was stable, worked appropriately and was cost effective," Truman adds. He notes that it also helped that RBC Dain Rauscher was already a Thomson customer.

Thomson Workstation, formerly known as ILX Workstation, is running on a dual server farm model in which the system sits at a central location. The previous system an on separate circuits and servers for each RBC branch operation in Canada.

Chris Perry, executive vice president, Banking and Brokerage at Thomson Financial, says this model is "much more cost effective [and] much easier to support and the level of reliability is far more superior than branch-based servers."

Perry says RBCdid not take a Thomson One package because it was not ready at the time that the agreement was signed, and Thomson did not want to change focus mid-migration.

However, he expects RBCto migrate to Thomson Workstation over the Thomson One framework within the five years covered by the deal. "We have a multi-year agreement and our expectations are that over the term of the agreement that we’ll migrate everything," he says.

Truman declines to identify the incumbent service at RBCInvestments, but a source says it was BridgeStation, which is now owned by Reuters. A Reuters spokesperson says, "Bridge engaged in deals that were not always economically advantageous. We will only carry over those that are." BridgeStation is now sold to premium users, while Reuters sells Reuters Plus into the off-floor area.

The workstations will be installed mainly in Canada and the US, although RBC also has some off-shore branches in the Carribean that will use it. Users include investment advisors and their assistants, branch managers and call center staff.

Thomson is providing real-time equity quotes, news, market statistics, rankings, global indices, fundamental data and time and sales data, among other content. In addition, it offers charting and Dynamic Data Exchange for importing market data into third-party applications. RBC currently distributes its internal research separately, although Truman says that could change in the future.