Thomson Reuters Embarks on Cloud Content Strategy to Boost Data Access

Part of Thomson Reuters’ wider technology strategy involves enhancing the Elektron Data Platform to make all pricing data accessible via a cloud API. The vendor has also expanded its partnership with enterprise application software provider SAP to provide comprehensive pricing and reference data via SAP’s cloud-based Market Rates Management platform.

“We’re making our datasets more readily available and consolidated for our existing clients across our non-real time and real-time environments that are all heavily reliant on next-generation platforms and cloud-based accessibility,” says Stuart Martin, managing director of risk information and learning services at Thomson Reuters. “We really want to make sure that our partners and our content services are accessible to the masses and available through market-leading technology, whether through proprietary services or through partners such as SAP. It really underlines our strategy—to have those services on a cloud environment as the industry adopts cloud is really important.”

The Elektron Data Platform provides data and analytics on a single platform, and allows clients to integrate their own data and distribute information across global business units. 

The first enhancement will provide access to data on more than 70 million instruments traded on 500 global exchanges and OTC markets via Amazon Web Services’ cloud in North America. Thomson Reuters plans to expand this service to Europe and Asia at the end of 2018.

The SAP Market Rates Management solution converts cross-border transaction prices into a single currency, regardless of where a transaction occurred. Thomson Reuters will embed its foreign exchange and money market data into SAP’s platform to provide clients with accurate global transactions.

“A lot of corporations take information from the internet or the back of a newspaper, which brings certain challenges when humans are involved. There tend to be more errors in manually processed information, so we’ve been working with SAP for some time to ensure that they get quality information from a pricing and reference data perspective powering their treasury systems,” Martin says, adding that cloud-based technology will reduce errors in data processing and limit the need for consuming data in silos by providing clients with better and agile tools to manage data based on personalized market outlooks.

Thomson Reuters pursued the “strategic alignment” with SAP because of the opportunity its use of cloud technology presented to deliver more Thomson Reuters content to SAP’s widely used treasury platform and treasury management systems, Martin adds.

“SAP has… a cloud-based environment, which is very robust and scalable. Clients can come and build services, and SAP is very agile in how they can manufacture certain capabilities, whether that’s running analytics or running core treasury liquidity management services,” he says. “It made a lot of sense for us collectively to ensure that our FX, our money markets, and our market data services were available off-the-shelf in pretty much a turnkey environment, which really means that clients who are on the treasury platform can have fully integrated market data services from Thomson Reuters as part of that package.”