Buy-Side Technology Awards 2017: Best Buy-Side EMS—Thomson Reuters

This year, the platform returns to the winners’ circle as the best buy-side EMS under the Thomson Reuters ownership—Thomson Reuters’ acquisition of REDI could have been viewed as the culmination of the vendors’ efforts to optimize its offering for the buy side, however the work the firm has done over the course of the last year to integrate the REDI EMS into its portfolio of solutions firmly dispels that simplistic notion.

The groundwork for integrating REDI into the Thomson Reuters portfolio was laid in March this year when the vendor completed a long-running project to consolidate and integrate a range of data, analytics and applications catering to buy-side firms into its Eikon data terminal. In June, Thomson Reuters initiated its integration work by adding the Eikon Messenger application to the REDI platform, connecting its buy-side users with its 30,000-strong sell-side community.

A month later, the firm completed the first major phase of its integration blueprint for REDI by introducing interoperability between the EMS and Eikon’s pre-trade content and functionality to support trading workflows, as well as tapping into a single source of market data that eliminates the need to acquire data from multiple providers, thereby reducing the cost of ownership. REDI users are now also able to subscribe to broader connectivity via the Autex platform, which offers indications of interest and advertised trades for large-in-scale trades, providing traders with enhanced visibility into available liquidity and executed trades. 

One of the most interesting outcomes of the REDI acquisition is that it will put Thomson Reuters squarely in competition with Bloomberg’s EMSX platform, not to mention the other established vendors in the execution management space, including Fidessa, Charles River, Eze Software Group, FlexTrade and Portware, now part of FactSet stable. 

By combining its significant data and analytics capabilities into REDI, Thomson Reuters has created a cross-asset trading platform that will give its competitors a serious run for their money as it continues to strengthen and build out its abilities.