Thomson Reuters Brings Eikon to Asset Managers

The latest release of Eikon integrates proprietary “Datastream” charting and advanced applications that offer powerful financial analytics and publishing tools, the firm says, as well as improved workflow efficiency and the ability to develop customized data visualizations. Thomson Reuters Datastream is the firm’s proprietary set of macro time series data.

Ranjit Tinaikar, managing director for advisory and investment management business at Thomson Reuters, tells PLANADVISER the latest release of Eikon should be attractive to a variety of professionals working in the retirement planning space, such as portfolio managers at large defined benefit (DB) plans or investment consultants helping to set up and monitor defined contribution (DC) plan investment menus.

New features for Eikon include a Microsoft Office add-in feature that enables portfolio managers and analysts to leverage Thomson Reuters’ content in applications such as Excel and PowerPoint to produce insightful models and presentations. This feature includes Excel tools to facilitate analysis of proprietary content sets including Datastream, fundamentals, StarMine analytics, smart estimates and key performance indicators.

The addition of StarMine models to Eikon leverages new visualization technology, Tinaikar says, to provide buy-side asset managers with greater insight to uncover actionable opportunities and better understand credit risk. The new Datastream charting app, he says, allows strategists to leverage the full power of Datastream’s multi-asset database and robust analytics and publishing tools to access prebuilt studies and generate new charts from the chart studio.

A new macro explorer app provides financial professionals with an intuitive view of global economies, allowing them to screen across hundreds of content sets sourced from Datastream and apply powerful visualization techniques including maps, bubble charts, motion tables and filters to investigate content and gain new insight. The product, in this sense, matches a wider industry trend towards data visualization as a means to gain new insights into financial patterns and behaviors (see “Plan Design, Meet Big Data”).

Ross Bailey, head of desktop solutions, advisory and investment management, tells PLANADVISER the Eikon portfolio analytics capabilities provide investment professionals with an intuitive monitor of intra-day performance across a wide range of benchmarks, allowing them to identify primary drivers of absolute and relative performance at both the sector and security level.

Eikon briefcase is another powerful workflow capability, he says, that allows users to collect, manage and access key content and documents through an integrated mobile solution.

Instead of a fixed home screen, Eikon now manifests itself as a floating command bar at the top of a customer’s screen, staying visible whatever application the customer is currently using and enabling quick access to Eikon’s data and tools. The floating command bar syncs with the Eikon plug-in for Google Chrome, which installs into the toolbar of Google Chrome’s browser interface.

More information on the release is available at www.thomsonreuters.com.