Thomson Reuters Upgrades Eikon with Apps, Add-Ons and Charting Tools for Buy-Side

Monday, 24/02/2014 | 17:31 GMT by Steven Hatzakis

As the company continues to optimize its Eikon platform, in an effort to streamline its business and consolidate its product lines into a few concentrated offerings, the latest enhancements aim to help achieve that goal.

Thomson Reuters Upgrades Eikon with Apps, Add-Ons and Charting Tools for Buy-Side

Thomson Reuters announced a number of new additions to Eikon, its financial markets desktop platform, adding Datastream charting, explorer apps, new StarMine models, enhanced Analytics and publishing tools, as well as improved efficiency for buy-side workflow, according to the press release.

The widely used platform that connects its users within the financial markets community and enables the execution of financial markets transactions across asset classes, such as foreign exchange (FX), fixed income, commodities, equities and derivatives, has been a focal point of the company's efforts to streamline its product offerings by consolidating them into a few concentrated product lines.

The new features rolled out were described as part of the ongoing evolution of Eikon, including enhancements that provide portfolio managers, analysts, strategists and economists with access to powerful analytics and workflow capabilities.

A new Microsoft Office add-in feature for Eikon, one of the new tools added, enables portfolio managers and analysts to Leverage databases within Thomson Reuters content and sources in applications such as Excel and PowerPoint, to add value into forecasting models and presentations.

Tools for Microsoft Excel facilitate deep analysis of premium content sets including Datastream, fundamentals, StarMine analytics, smart estimates and key performance indicators, as described in the release.

Also noted was how the addition of StarMine models to Eikon leverages new visualization technology to provide buy-side customers with greater insight to uncover actionable opportunities and better understand credit risk.

Microsoft Add-ons and Google Chrome Extension

The new Datastream charting app in Eikon allows more thorough technical analysis to be conducted by leveraging the full power of Datastream's vast database across asset classes, and publishing tools to access prebuilt studies while composing charts. In addition, a visual explorer mapping the world with economic data, provides a way to see geographical distributions and comparisons as the global economy unfolds across various countries with a choice of different chart types to view the data.

Commenting in the official press release, Ranjit Tinaikar, managing director, advisory & investment management at Thomson Reuters said, "Our clients are at the core of our business model,"and concluded, "With the addition of key buy-side capabilities such as Datastream charting and explorer apps, new StarMine models, enhanced analytics and publishing tools, we are combining next-generation content with innovative visualization and analytics tools to vastly improve the way asset managers approach and process information across their workflow. These enhancements represent a significant milestone as we continue to work closely with our clients to meet their evolving needs through further advances in Thomson Reuters Eikon."

Eikon now manifests itself as a floating command bar at the top of a customer's screen, staying visible with whatever application customers are using and provides access to Eikon's data and tools, on the fly.

Floating Command Bar Part of Revamped Design

The above mentioned command bar works with the Eikon plug-in for Google Chrome which is installed into the toolbar of Google Chrome's browser interface and can -at the user's request - allow Eikon to analyze information that is being viewed on the internet and provide key related data for any entities listed on the page.

Thomson Reuters recently added technology to reduce its compliance risks, surrounding market surveillance and internal supervision. The company's WM/Reuters product, which collates rates for FX, has been the subject of a class-action lawsuit against some 10 entities, but did not include Thomson Reuters as it was not involved in affecting those rates, but rather collated them along with WM, a State Street business, in the jointly run product offering under the WM/Reuters name.

The company's FX dealing business lines, including FxAll, has just seen an upsurge in FX trading volumes during January 2014, after ISDA chose the company over ICAP to calculate USD interest rate swaps benchmark, ISDAfix.