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Fixed-Income Focus

While many vendors in the securities industry are breaking down their solutions to offer separate components, Thomson Financial (booth # 3200) is taking the opposite approach.

While many vendors in the securities industry are breaking down their solutions to offer separate components, Thomson Financial (booth # 3200) is taking the opposite approach. Thomson has released Thomson ONE Yield, a fixed-income offering that integrates Thomson's fixed-income products into one open-application framework.

"Our products have been out there for a long time, but this is our first effort into the institutional-desktop market," explains Lou Eccleston, president of Thomson's Banking and Brokerage group. "Thomson has had brand names and products distributed across other desktops, but never on its own and never integrated to this extent."

Fixed income is often viewed as a difficult market service, says Eccleston, particularly because, unlike equities, there is no fixed-income stock market. "Pricing data and data on securities is not as institutionalized and readily available," he says.

As part of the Thomson ONE open-application framework solution, which also includes Advisor and Equity, Yield enables the user to integrate Thomson data with proprietary and third-party information into a single interface, according to the vendor.

Yield's initial phase, which is available now, includes market data such as pricing, news and research feeds, as well as analytics ranging from yield curves to option-adjusted spreads.

Later additions will include messaging and communications, as well as transaction and execution systems, says Eccleston, an addition to the suite which was made possible by Thomson's acquisition of trading-systems vendor Quant Trading, earlier this year.

"Quant Trading is an established product with over 20 institutional clients, and we've taken components of it and integrated it into our desktop," he says, adding that Quant Trading's development team has added its expertise to Thomson's fixed-income operation. "They've immediately accelerated our knowledge base."

Eccleston says that Thomson hopes to gain market share from Bloomberg, who dominates the fixed-income desktop realm, but believes Thomson's only other competitors are specialized, best-of-breed technologies. "There's a plethora of niche applications from risk management to data systems, but they are all just one component," he says. "The problem is the cost of integrating, then nourishing the applications with data, maintenance, support and upgrades."

Eccleston asserts that Thomson doesn't specialize in everything, but instead leverages partnerships, noting that the draw of Yield's open architecture is the ability to leverage existing-technology relationships. "You'll never find one company to do every single thing," he says. "Thomson ONE is not a product but (rather) a business model that is easy and cost-effective to integrate with."

While this is Thomson's first integrated foray into the fixed-income marketplace, Eccleston predicts there will be significant interest from firms, saying that a ground-level relationship with Yield would allow a firm to influence the shape of the solution. In addition, Eccleston notes that Yield is available on the same desktop as other ONE components - such as Advisor and Equity - explaining that entitlements will determine what user sees which components on the dashboard.Eccleston says that Yield will be priced according to the amount of products and services that a firm chooses to implement, but says that Thomson's price point is lower than that of its competitors.

"Our value proposition is that firms can save money based on a pure price component, displacing disparate systems and reducing the cost of ownership," he explains. "This is exactly the right environment to make that type of investment."

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