Overall Best Data Provider: Thomson Reuters

With a private equity deal on the cards, it is no surprise that one market data vendor is making headlines in 2018. At the beginning of the year, Thomson Reuters announced it would sell 55 percent of its financial and risk business to a Blackstone-led consortium, a nod to Thomson Reuters’ robust data and analytics offering. After being named Best Reference Data Integration Vendor and rising to the top of the reader survey for Best Market Data Provider (Vendor), Thomson Reuters was this year bestowed the prestigious, editorially decided, Overall Best Data Provider award.

Max Bowie, editor of Inside Data Management, says: “We chose Thomson Reuters as this year’s winner not just on the basis of those categories it won, but also on the strength of entries in other categories and the breadth of its overall offering.” The award reflects Thomson Reuters’ status as a trusted vendor with an extensive breadth and depth of reference and market data offerings, and also recognizes the firm’s recent work to help the industry through implementation of the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid II) by investing $50 million in its Mifid II-compliance program. “It was a number-one priority for 2017, and the feedback is that we have done a phenomenal job,” says Brennan Carley, global head of enterprise at Thomson Reuters, who spent the first weeks of the year in London to support the move to Mifid II. 

In addition to the strong focus on helping the industry through a challenging year, Thomson Reuters has continued to enhance other content and services. Last year’s improvements range from the launch of a cryptocurrency sentiment data feed that uses machine learning and text analysis to quantify key themes and sentiments across over 2,000 global news and 800 social media sites, to the introduction of additional content to fuel transparency in the fixed-income market.

However, regulation is still the main driver of change. With the Mifid II work continuing, Thomson Reuters has recently launched Velocity Analytics, and other regulatory initiatives on the radar include the Fundamental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB). “We have created an advisory board for FRTB, and have a major initiative under way there,” says Carley. 

From a technology perspective, the vendor is also making strides by taking a cloud-first approach. This spring, quantitative analytics have been made available in the cloud, offering customers fast implementation times and no infrastructure needs. “We think the cloud will have as disruptive an impact on how asset managers and hedge funds run their infrastructure as the internet had 20 years ago,” says Carley. “You should expect to see more market data and other content-related offerings made available in a public cloud. We’re making a major pivot in that direction.”

Read more about the IMD/IRD Awards 2018 winners