About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Refinitiv Sets Out Rationale Behind Closure of Wrexham Entity Data Processing Facility

Subscribe to our newsletter

Refinitiv’s proposal to close the Wrexham facility where it produces its Verified Entity Data as a Service – formerly the entity data service provided by Avox – looks like the beginning of a slippery slope as the company states that the proposal ‘has been made as we seek to focus our operations in fewer, larger centres as part of a global review of our operations.’ The statement continues, ‘This means we intend to close the site in Wrexham and relocate the work to larger operational centres in other locations as we look to drive results for our customers in a highly competitive environment.’

The company’s intended closure of the site puts 300 jobs at risk and is expected to transfer the entity data service to Bangalore, where Refinitiv (formerly Thomson Reuters Financial & Risk business) has operated a large data processing centre for about 10 years. It says it is in a consultation process with employees at Wrexham to consider whether there are other job opportunities for them within Refinitiv, and notes that some technology roles at Wrexham may be moved to Nottingham, where the company has a technology development centre.

Refinitiv’s proposal to close the Wrexham site has been met with considerable local concern, and questioned by former management and staff. In a LinkedIn post, Ken Price, formerly CEO of Avox, writes: “It is with sadness and frustration that I read about the former Avox business which Steve French and I started in 2002 in Wrexham, Wales being closed down and relocated to Bangalore by the new owners, Blackstone. The spreadsheet jockeys have completely missed the boat on this one. The benefits of the Wrexham operation far outweigh the marginal additional costs.”

Another post questions whether the high quality of data and communication with customers provided by the Wrexham team will be the same going forward. Refinitiv states, ‘Should our proposal move forward, we would focus on maintaining the high levels of quality to which clients have become accustomed.’

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Streamlining trading and investment processes with data standards and identifiers

Financial institutions are integrating not only greater volumes of data for use across their organisation but also more varieties of data. As well, that data is being applied to more use cases than ever before, especially regulatory compliance and ESG integration. Due to this increased complexity of institutions’ data needs, however, information often arrives into...

BLOG

AI Governance Frameworks Are Emerging as Applications Abound: Webinar Review

Capital markets leaders are in the early stages of implementing comprehensive artificial intelligence governance frameworks as they begin to realise the challenges as well as the opportunities offered by the technology. As the adoption of AI accelerates it’s becoming apparent that it needs its own set of rules on how it can be effectively and...

EVENT

RegTech Summit New York

Now in its 9th year, the RegTech Summit in New York will bring together the RegTech ecosystem to explore how the North American capital markets financial industry can leverage technology to drive innovation, cut costs and support regulatory change.

GUIDE

Regulatory Data Handbook 2025 – Thirteenth Edition

Welcome to the thirteenth edition of A-Team Group’s Regulatory Data Handbook, a unique and practical guide to capital markets regulation, regulatory change, and the data and data management requirements of compliance across Europe, the UK, US and Asia-Pacific. This year’s edition lands at a moment of accelerating regulatory divergence and intensifying data focused supervision. Inside,...