Reuters has traditionally been a leading player in the financial information market space with a strong front-office focus, with the result that its activities in the middle and back office space haven’t been taken seriously –often being called a by-product of its front-office offerings.
This, however, seems set to change with Datascope, a solution for mid- and back-office operations that addresses pricing, historical and reference data needs. Reuters preliminary results released in February of this year highlighted the 50% growth in revenue throughout 2003 of the DataScope business.
Showing its commitment to grow the business, the vendor recently announced a slew of new hires in the direct sales, third party alliance and operational teams. A number of these have joined from the competition, such as Caroline O’Shaughnessy who heads up the European third party business for Reuters Datascope and who was earlier at FT Interactive Data. So, too, was Alistair Tye, Business Development Manager. Tim Rice, responsible for third-party business development efforts in North America was most recently at Moneyline Telerate and Pierre Poux, Sales Manager who was earlier at Fininfo, the French leading provider of valuation services.
Kevin Bradshaw, Global Head of Reuters DataScope comments, “We’re delighted with how the Reuters DataScope business is developing and with the team expansion over the past few months. The rapid growth of the Reuters DataScope team has been pursued to support our objectives of growing market share in the mid and back office data market.” According to Bradshaw, the vendor’s decision to focus strongly on the back office market is fuelled by, “Good growth opportunity. Traditionally only one or two players have serviced this space and we believe that our customers need more choice.”
The vendor has embarked upon a rebranding of its various back-office product lines to support planned acceleration in sales growth. Kelly Lavelle, Marketing Director, Reuters DataScope, recently recruited from competitor IDC, comments: “We are now close to completing the consolidation of our branding efforts for this business under the Reuters DataScope product family umbrella. Previously disparate DataScope and EJV branded offerings have been brought together to support our ongoing product consolidation and development plans.”
Reuters Datascope has also entered into a strategic alliance with Asset Control, a leading provider of reference data management solutions to the financial industry. The two firms will integrate their products, enabling users to rapidly implement the entire range of Reuters DataScope products in Asset Control’s data management solutions. While other players in the back office arena such as FT Interactive Data and Telekurs have long had such alliances with data management solution providers, this the first one for Reuters Datascope, another indication of the vendor’s focus on this space.
Through this alliance Reuters aims to strengthen the position of Reuters DataScope as a primary data source, offering its customers complete solutions to manage and distribute Reuters data to a department or throughout the enterprise – from automatic corporate action management to synchronizing pricing and reference data across the whole company. ‘
Todd McGee, Vice President of third party alliances at Reuters DataScope comments: “By combining Reuters proprietary security identification and reference data and Asset Control’s ability to match identifiers with other coding systems, our integrated solution enables information to travel seamlessly between trading floors and back offices.” He adds, “With Asset Control, the sourcing, storage and manipulation of reference data can be centralized – creating a company-wide standard for all data instantly. Instead of being hindered by the costly inefficiencies of different data types in different systems, companies can create one unified environment supporting the entire transaction flow and asset management realm.” — editors; www.globalcustodian.com.