Reuters reports strong levels of interest in its recently launched Asian fixed-income evaluated pricing service, and says it has already signed up users.
The service covers six currencies – the Australian dollar, the Hong Kong dollar, the Japanese yen, the new Taiwan dollar, the New Zealand dollar and the Singapore dollar – and some 20,000 government and corporate investment-grade securities. The evaluations are done out of Japan and Australia, and the service provides premium pricing delivery at 4 p.m. and 6 p.m., Tokyo time, as well as end-of-day evaluations.
Barnaby Nelson, the Hong Kong-based head of the Reuters DataScope business for Asia, says Reuters is seeing “huge demand” for the new service, including from customers in China and Japan. “The nature of the markets is that there is not much liquidity in fixed-income outside government bonds, and therefore institutions need those pricing gaps to be filled,” he says.
Its fixed-income evaluated pricing service is proving to be one of the most popular Reuters DataScope offerings in the Asian region, Nelson says, along with its tick capture engine, for which it is seeing consider-able demand in the major centres such as Japan as a result of the growth in algorithmic trading. The evaluations are delivered via DataScope Select, which gives Reuters a lever to encourage users to take up other data services as well, he adds.
The Reuters fixed-income evaluated pricing service now covers 21 currencies across 33 US, European, Asian and emerging markets, for 153,000 investment grade securities.
Separately, Reuters has opened its first wholly-owned development centre in China. Reuters Technology China Ltd (RTCL) is based in Beijing’s Zhongguancun Software Park, zPark. The development division of RTCL will focus on the infrastructure supporting Reuters products such as 3000Xtra, Reuters Trader and Reuters Knowledge. A new data operations centre is being established in RTCL to support the company’s growth plans for content. This will include inputting mergers and acquisitions data, company financial reports, company forecasts and economic data for markets in China, Korea and Japan.
