Best Market Data Provider (Vendor): Refinitiv

Thomson Reuters last year topped the reader survey for Best Market Data Provider (Vendor) after a 14‑year reign in this category by Bloomberg. This year, Refinitiv—formerly the financial and risk business of Thomson Reuters—continues that success.

Refinitiv stands out for its data quality, depth of coverage and continuing enhancements to the Elektron Data Platform. “Our content and infrastructure are, without doubt, what our customers value—and the fact that we consistently provide a reliable service that expands year after year to reflect market needs,” says Marion Leslie, managing director of Enterprise at Refinitiv. 

Over the past year, Refinitiv has continued to deliver new content sets on Elektron, which now carries 84 million instruments. “We are always looking to increase our exclusivity and unique datasets,” Leslie says. “For example, we are the only data provider to carry Tradeweb and MarketAxess data, which strengthens our proposition in the fixed-income space.”

Refinitiv added hundreds of new datasets to Elekton in 2018, through the onboarding of new venues and by enhancing existing sources. “As markets grow and become more transparent, we will seek to make that data available to customers,” says Leslie, adding that emerging markets data and cryptocurrencies have been particular areas of focus for the company over the past year.

From a technology standpoint, a big shift for Refinitiv has been in making its data accessible in the cloud. This enhancement to Elektron provides users with access to
real-time data on the Amazon Web Services cloud, with work under way to expand its global footprint to improve service quality for customers. 

“Moving to the cloud democratizes access to our data and reaches a whole host of new types of customers who previously haven’t wanted to invest in on-premise infrastructure,” says Leslie. “We are giving clients increased flexibility in how they use the data, whether they need it on-premise, as a managed service or in the cloud.”

While Refinitiv has made a major leap already, it will continue to make enhancements and provide access to a wider range of data outside of real-time in the cloud. 

Refinitiv will also continue to enhance its content assets, adding, on average, 100 new datasets per month, and will ramp up its Tick History data service, for which it is seeing growing demand. “Everything that we carry on the Elektron network is made available through Tick History, and we are seeing a huge appetite for that data, whether it’s for
regression analysis, stress testing, scenario planning, new product development, risk management or data science,” says Leslie. 

Read more about the Inside Market Data & Inside Reference Data Awards 2019 winners