Thomson Reuters, in partnership with Visible Alpha, has launched multiple joint-solutions in its flagship financial desktop Eikon that will help enable financial institutions to further manage impending MiFID II research unbundling requirements, set to be implemented 3 January, 2018.
These tools, complementing Eikon’s already robust research solutions, allow buy-side professionals to track corporate access and sell-side interactions, manage the research valuation process, review and vote on research provider value as well as manage inducements. All of the following capabilities will be available in Eikon.
Visible Alpha’s ONEaccess Resource Tracking application enables Eikon users to monitor, integrate and analyse their broker interactions and research consumption from research providers in an aggregated manner. By employing a proprietary process, ONEaccess Resource Tracking sources and cleans interactions data from hundreds of contributing brokers and provides transparency into what buy-side clients are consuming.
In addition to ONEaccess Resource Tracking, Thomson Reuters will be offering Visible Alpha’s ONEaccess Broker Vote application within Eikon. With access to Broker Vote, users can populate recommended benchmarks based on weighted interactions data to better understand the value received across all research relationships as well as run a budget-based vote. The third application available in Eikon is Visible Alpha’s ONEaccess Forward Calendar, a configurable calendar of corporate access events sourced from more than 150 research providers. Users can request access to attend events and manage their activity with integration into Outlook and CRM systems.
MiFID II imposes a series of new restrictions and structures on research use by financial institutions, specifically how research is paid for and managed by the institution. The rules effectively eliminate free research or research paid based on specific trading or investing decisions. To help clients navigate these research unbundling challenges, Thomson Reuters Eikon research solutions provide users the ability to objectively assess sell-side analyst quality, manage entitlements to external research, gain insights quicker through improved research discovery, and effectively evaluate a firm’s research team.
“MiFID’s research unbundling regulations will bring about profound changes in the research segment of financial services, fuelling the need for new products to be in place so that institutions can manage these changes,” says Mahesh Narayan, head of portfolio management and research, Thomson Reuters. “Partnering with specialised third-parties that enhance existing Eikon capabilities is central to our open platform approach. Adding Visible Alpha’s ONEaccess applications to Eikon brings further value to our already powerful research capabilities such that Eikon clients will now have an unbiased and robust solution to meet their research unbundling needs.”
“In order to ensure compliance with MiFID II regulations, firms must be empowered with the right tools to prepare for and execute on the new requirements,” says Mike Stepanovich (pictured), President of Enterprise Services, Visible Alpha. “By partnering with Thomson Reuters and integrating our Resource Tracking, Broker Vote and Forward Calendar applications into Eikon, we are enabling firms with the tools to consume, track and value research content from 450+ providers and achieve compliance in the most streamlined way.”
