Reuters has added an enhancement to Reuters DataScope Select which will see its corporate actions data updated hourly, rather than once a day. Users will be able to monitor portfolios more actively by choosing how often they receive updates and paying according to the quantity of data they use, Reuters says.
The release of the Intraday Corporate Actions Service provides clients with access to Reuters’ Corporate Action database on an hourly basis through DataScope Select, enabling them to keep up to date with information drawn from more than 50,000 companies in 70 plus countries. Reuters collects, processes and verifies corporate actions 24 hours a day in local data centres on the day of announcement to the market.
As new information is collected, analysts update the database. These events are fed, on an hourly basis, to the DataScope Select platform. DataScope Select provides clients with the ability to schedule recurring snapshots of this data every hour to get the latest information. Clients will be able to select only the data they require, which includes dividends, initial public offerings and mergers and acquisitions information, and pay only for the data they consume.
Commenting on the development of the new service, Brian Filanowski, EMEA business owner, Pricing and Reference Data at Reuters, says it required a significant amount of effort, but is a capability Reuters sees as being of strategic importance to its business.
“We were comfortable with the infrastructure as we had already previously updated the core infrastructure for collecting, processing and storing data,” he says. “However, we needed to scale our resourcing in our local data collection centres and conduct a complete audit of all of our global sources to ensure we had the best quality coverage to support intraday processing,” he adds. “Once this effort was completed, it was very easy to add into DataScope Select and was released in the December 2007 quarterly release.”
The Intraday Corporate Actions project started 10 months ago and was done in response to clients’ needs, according to Filanowski. “With the increase of trade volumes due to algorithmic trading and regulatory initiatives such as MiFID, clients require more timely data. Corporate action volumes have tripled over the last five years. The increases in automation have required more timely data around price-affecting events such as dividends, splits et cetera. OTC derivatives require up-to-date data on underlying securities,” he adds.
“We launched this service in December 2007 and have already had great feedback. Clients who are trading globally no longer have to wait for an ‘end of day’ file to retrieve corporate actions. Instead, they can get the latest events when they need them,” concludes Filanowski.
Reuters competitor Interactive Data recently began delivering corporate actions information in North America on an intraday basis – every two hours (Reference Data Review, November 2007).
Subscribe to our newsletter
