Waters Rankings 2014: Best Reference Data Provider — Thomson Reuters

The vendor believes that the three differentiators in the reference data space are coverage, quality of service, and timely accuracy. Along with the coverage mentioned above, its fixed-income coverage includes governments, corporates, loans, convertibles, high yields, municipals and asset-backed and mortgage-backed securities, with access to over 5.6 million active and retired securities.

Service quality comes from experienced data professionals positioned globally within their respective markets, and securities expertise delivering accurate and robust securities and investment instrument reference data, terms and conditions, and pricing to clients. Those professionals continually monitor data-quality metrics that track accuracy, timeliness and completeness, and then use the findings to improve workflow and data-capture processes.

When it comes to timely accuracy, Thomson Reuters offers end-of-day delivery of prices in line with a wide range of market closes as well as intra-day pricing.

“This award is a testament to the fact that our reference data offering is so incredibly robust” says Jayme Fagas, head of valuations and transparency at Thomson Reuters. “I was in meetings yesterday with some clients and they rightly asked, ‘Why should we choose your evaluated pricing over the competition?’ My answer was simple: Behind our pricing is this really rich and valued reference data offering. My team and I are internal clients for the same content every day, and when we initiate our evaluated pricing workflows, we are using the same reference data. When we get good feedback on our pricing, when we hear that we’re accurate and have full coverage, it goes hand in hand with how strong our reference data offering is.”

Features include: full terms and conditions data, including ratings and descriptive content for each asset type; turn-key reference data; and historical time-series pricing, with approximately 20 years’ worth of price history available for established equity markets, and more than 20 years’ coverage for money and index data.