Hoping to give its clients a comprehensive view of the information they need to make decisions in the financial markets, Thomson Reuters five years ago rolled out a homegrown financial analysis tool called Eikon.
Eikon successfully pulled together and displayed in a comprehensive way data that had once been siloed, but the company saw opportunities to improve on its capabilities, says Albert Lojko, global head of Eikon at Thomson Reuters, a provider of information to professionals in a range of fields. So as part of its ongoing efforts to update Eikon, the company developed several new key capabilities, including a natural language search function that allows users to pose open-ended questions.
"We translate [the natural language questions] into a structured query in our platform, and we give [clients] a visual representation back so they understand correlations. That allows people to discover answers to questions dramatically faster than they had before," Lojko says. Thomson Reuters also developed an interactive feature that gives users a single global map with overlays of real-time weather, news and business data, such as ship routes. And in February, the company rolled out a tool called Social Media Monitor, which analyzes and scores social media posts to give users insight into trends.
Lojko says the biggest challenge in developing these capabilities was assembling the talent to make it happen. He says he sought experts with deep domain expertise, particularly in search capabilities, from top companies even if they had no experience in financial services.