Thomson Reuters has added a price challenge tool for fixed income professionals to its DataScope Select data delivery platform. The tool, AskTRPS, is designed to make the price challenge process faster, smoother, more transparent and easier to report for auditory and regulatory purposes.
AskTRPS enhances the Thomson Reuters Pricing Service (TRPS) by allowing DataScope Select users to challenge fixed income evaluated prices from the company’s pricing service with a couple of mouse clicks and receive information about how a security has been priced. Much of this information, such as pricing inputs, price history and tolerance breaks, is already offered by DataScope Select, but it has now been incorporated into the price challenge process and can be sufficient to resolve a challenge before it is submitted.
As well as improving the process of challenging evaluated prices, AskTRPS supports regulatory reporting requirements and recommendations for fixed income pricing by allowing users to create customised reports on their price challenges, including the number of challenges and asset class breakdowns.
It also improves communications between DataScope Select users and TRPS evaluators by allowing them to add comments to an assigned or resolved challenge within 36 hours of submission. Similarly, relevant information can be uploaded with each challenge, such as trade data or market colour, and batch challenges can be made by uploading a spreadsheet to DataScope Select. When a challenge has been resolved, clients are alerted by email.
AskTRPS is a result of feedback from users of the DataScope Select pricing service. It has been available since March and is an added value feature of DataScope Select with no additional charge. It is also available on Thomson Reuters’ Eikon Messenger financial desktop, allowing the use of instant messaging for evaluated price challenges and chats to achieve resolution.
Robert Vincini, head of pricing service specialists at Thomson Reuters, explains: “AskTRPS provides additional transparency around how our pricing experts have come up with evaluated prices. More preventive information reduces the number of challenges, saving everybody’s time, and the incorporation of AskTRPS within DataScope Select improves the customer experience, making the price challenge process faster and easier.”
The company previously offered a customer website where price challenges could be submitted and says this will remain in operation for the foreseeable future, although it expects most users will switch from the web service to the DataScope Select option for a faster and more efficient evaluated pricing challenge process.
Looking forward, Vincini says AskTRPS will be enhanced over the next couple of quarters with more preventive information. It will later be integrated with Reuters’ news service to add, for example, news on particular securities to the information.
