1,300 FXall Customers Get Access to Eikon Messenger

Thomson Reuters has expanded the Eikon Messenger community by expanding access to FXall clients, the electronic foreign exchange platform it acquired in July 2012. All 1,300 FXall customers will now be able to interact with Eikon Messenger's community of 190,000 financial professionals directly from their FXall toolbar, via the latest release of FXall Trading.

Instant messaging has become a part of the financial community's price discovery and pretrade operations. "We are seeing a fundamental shift in the way the industry uses social tools, such as chat, to work," said Peter Moss, managing director, trading, financial and risk at Thomson Reuters, in an interview. "The professional world is catching up with the way consumers use these tools to interact," noting, however, that financial services chat and messaging functionality needs archiving and compliance functionality.

Instant messaging communities, however, are traditionally allied to a particular company or technology platform that can make them siloed, disparate and closed by design. As a result, financial markets professionals are currently limited to making contacts within their chosen messaging network or forced to manage the complexity of multiple messaging systems.

Thomson Reuters Eikon Messenger is built on the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) standard. "The broader picture is that there is a shift to universal connectivity and ubiquitous access," Moss says. XMPP can allow users to manage all chat functions through a single instant messaging tool, rather than use multiple IM tools to connect with people on other chat platforms.

"Financial professionals depend on instant messaging tools to interact with the wider financial community and want tools that allow them to interact, irrespective of their choice of provider," said David Craig, president of Financial & Risk at Thomson Reuters, in a statement. "This is why we've always been focused on using open standards and with connecting with other widely used instant messaging systems. By opening up Eikon Messenger to the FXall community we are enabling the sell-side and buy-side to communicate more efficiently within networks they already trust."

FXall clients, which account for approximate 1,300 institutional firms across a range of traders, asset managers, corporate treasurers, broker-dealers, prime brokers and market makers, can now access the live feed of continuous cross-asset global macro data, news and market expert commentary available over Thomson Reuters Eikon Messenger's 27 global chat forums. They will also be able to collaborate with liquidity providers and colleagues, as well as create public or private communities in Eikon's network of 190,000 financial professionals.

Thomson Reuters Eikon Messenger (formerly Thomson Reuters Messenger) is an enterprise-level instant messaging tool designed for the financial markets. It is open to all financial markets professionals, regardless of the desktop they use, and available either via Thomson Reuters Eikon or as a standalone instant message tool. It allows financial professionals around the world to participate in a community consisting of customers, colleagues and business counterparties. Greg MacSweeney is editorial director of InformationWeek Financial Services, whose brands include Wall Street & Technology, Bank Systems & Technology, Advanced Trading, and Insurance & Technology. View Full Bio