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

Thomson Reuters Returns to the EC with Revised Offer on RICs

Subscribe to our newsletter

Thomson Reuters has returned to the negotiation table at the European Commission with a revised offer on how it will ease licensing policies for Reuters Instrument Codes (RICs). The issue of access to security and other identifiers will be discussed in a panel session at A-Team’s forthcoming Data Management Summit in London on May 22 (find out more here).

Thomson Reuters’ latest approach follows the company’s inability to avert an antitrust investigation of its policies in December 2011 when it proposed commitments that would offer some concessions to users of RICs. This proposal was market tested by the Commission, but found to fall short of its requirements, leaving Thomson Reuters in breach of European competition rules.

The Commission confirmed receipt of another tranche of commitments from Thomson Reuters on RICs late last week, but declined to detail their content.

Similarly, Thomson Reuters is giving nothing away, stating only: “After reviewing the feedback from the European Commission’s market test, Thomson Reuters submitted a revised offer to the EC which is aimed at addressing the comments of our customers. It is premature to comment further or discuss those details, but we are continuing to cooperate fully with the EC and look forward to resolving this matter.”

While there is no definitive timescale to resolve the issue, the Commission is likely to run out of patience if settlement is drawn out for too much longer. Thomson Reuters could then face financial penalties if it remains in breach of the competition rules.

After the unsuccessful market test using the concessions proposed by Thomson Reuters in December, Joaquin Almunia, vice president of the Commission responsible for competition, told delegates at the March 8 2012 European Competition and Consumer Day in Copenhagen: “We have concerns that Thomson Reuters has potentially abused a dominant market position by restricting the usage of its identification codes, RICs, thereby limiting the ability of its customers to switch to competing data providers. Recently, we have unsuccessfully market tested a solution offered by Thomson Reuters to facilitate switching. We have now reached a critical stage in this investigation. If no effective solution can be agreed upon, then we will have to draw the adequate conclusions.”

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Are you making the most of the business-critical structured data stored in your mainframes?

Fewer than 30% of companies think that they can fully tap into their mainframe data even though complete, accurate and real-time data is key to business decision-making, compliance, modernisation and innovation. For many in financial markets, integrating data across the enterprise and making it available and actionable to everyone who needs it is extremely difficult....

BLOG

AI in Focus as Experts Meet in UK Capital for Data Management Summit London

Artificial intelligence has dominated the data management conversation in the past couple of years as organisations have recognised the technology’s potential to streamline operations, improve decision making and draw value from the data they use. A-Team Group has responded to the growing demand for intelligence on AI and has given the technology a keen focus...

EVENT

Data Licensing Forum 2025

The Data Licensing Forum will explore industry trends, themes and specific developments relating to licensing of financial market data from Exchanges and Data Vendors.

GUIDE

Enterprise Data Management

The current financial crisis has highlighted that financial institutions do not have a sufficient handle on their data and has prompted many of these institutions to re-evaluate their approaches to data management. Moreover, the increased regulatory scrutiny of the financial services community during the past year has meant that data management has become a key...