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Thomson Reuters today announced that it will facilitate financial market institutions' trade processing needs by making its Reuters Instrument Codes available to financial institutions beyond its desktops and feeds. This new offering, which will allow customers and any other financial market participant to use its instrument codes for trade processing purposes, is in response to customer demands and recognises the value and integrity of Thomson Reuters symbology.
Thomson Reuters today also announced that BATS Chi-X Europe, the largest European equities exchange by market share and notional value, has signed up for the service. This launch supports Thomson Reuters vision to connect and enable the global financial community and represents a step forward in addressing the financial community’s symbology needs across all parts of the trading life cycle.
"This move by Thomson Reuters comes at a crucial time as the market faces serious pressure from the regulatory community and the C-level to get a better handle on data across the organization for reporting purposes and to better inform business decision-making," said Virginie O’Shea, post-trade technology analyst at Aite Group. "There is little appetite and scarce resources to adopt a new standard, so being able to work with one of the established data symbologies across the trade lifecycle will enable firms to tackle the cross-referencing exercise on the front foot."
As financial markets have evolved, there has been a proliferation of trading venues and participants and exponential growth in trading volume, adding complexity, cost and operational risk. New regulations have also increased the burden of risk management and trade reporting, all while the market experiences growing competition for trade flow. The launch of the new service paves the way towards more efficient and reliable capital markets by providing market participants the freedom to use Reuters Instrument Code (RIC) symbols irrespective of whether or not they use Thomson Reuters enterprise data products.
"Cross referencing the BATS Chi-X Europe instrument codes with the Thomson Reuters RIC symbols will enable us to reach new market participants as well as improve efficiency and data transparency by facilitating accurate identification of securities on our platform," said Paul O’Donnell, chief operating officer, BATS Chi-X Europe. "We welcome this move by Thomson Reuters and are pleased to sign up to this offering."
Thomson Reuters new service will allow market participants to use and cross reference the RIC symbol for trade activities. It will facilitate the advertisement of liquidity, acceptance of trade flow and execution of post trade activities with the RIC symbol as a consistent identifier throughout the process. Additionally, the service will allow Thomson Reuters pricing and reference data customers to use RICs to reference and retrieve securities data from their securities master databases and navigate to connected content such as legal entity information.
"The RIC's unique characteristics make it a natural choice for the identification of securities in trade processing. By offering the RIC to all market participants Thomson Reuters promotes operational efficiencies and supports competitive advantage as financial market participants can more reliably communicate with each other and capture more order flow," said Gerry Buggy, global head of Enterprise Content at Thomson Reuters. "As our customers move to meet regulatory demands and reduce costs, we are pleased to take this first step in supporting the financial community's symbology needs across all parts of the trading life cycle through our evolving symbology services."
RICs are alphanumerical symbols that are an integral part and the centrepiece of the information service products the company offers, as they enable its customers to identify and retrieve data from its desktops, feeds and other content services. RIC symbols are provided for a broad range of content from Thomson Reuters across equities, bond markets, FX and money markets, commodities and energy, funds, indicators/indices and derivatives.
