Reuters is targeting the evaluations pricing market in Europe, with the addition of European-issued debt securities evaluations to its DataScope reference data service. The service will be bring the vendor into a space currently dominated by FT Interactive Data, and increasingly focused on by Standard & Poor’s.
As reported by Reference Data Review at the start of the year, expanding its European data services is a strategic aim of the vendor’s, which has a stronghold in the real-time pricing business from which it hopes to extend into intraday pricing. Evaluated pricing – synthetic prices used to value more illiquid securities – is a key tenet of this strategy, according to group head Kevin Bradshaw at the time.
The launch is the first phase of the evaluations pricing services Reuters is planning to introduce. It covers investment grade securities including liquid and illiquid government, corporate, agencies, supranational debt from 17 European countries. The coverage extends across a range of bond types, structures and maturitites.
The data will be made available via Datascope’s end-of-day and premium delivery services. The initial target audience is the mutual fund accounting and administration market, where Reuters believes the biggest demand will be.
Says Kelly Lavelle, global head of marketing for the Enterprise Information division at Reuters, “It is our buy-side, and specifically our fund accounting customers, that have been the driving force behind the launch of our European evaluations (service). They have a need to source daily fixed income evaluations in order to perform their net asset value calculations for internationally invested funds.”
Supporting this effort is a growing team of analysts hired by Reuters for the purpose of building up its European evaluations coverage. Reuters bought its way into the evaluations business with the acquisition of EJV as part of the Bridge Information Systems purchase in 2001. EJV, originally founded in 1990 by primary dealers in U.S. Treasury securities, provided a database of fixed income security master data and evaluations, primarily focused on the U.S. market. EJV’s services are now branded as Datascope Onsite.
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