Thomson Reuters 'feeling strain' - blog

Thomson Reuters’ stock price has dropped in the last few weeks due to worries that its business will be affected by the Wall Street job cuts.

But within Thomson Reuters, all is well and the combined entity has already come out with its first series of integrated products for wealth managers, according to Debra Walton, global head of market development, the blog said in a post headed State of the Reuters-Thomson Union.

“We spent our first 90 days focusing on two key areas: people integration and laying out our product strategy,” she says. Walton said she could not disclose how many employees have been laid off, but “it’s not about reduction of people”.

While the company has “synergy targets” it needs to deliver on, Walton says those synergies will come more from consolidating real estate and sharing back-end infrastructure than from letting go of people.

On the product side, Thomson Reuters is trying to come up with best-of-breed product combinations.

“There’s less overlap than you would think,” Walton says. The company has already mashed some of the two companies’ products. For instance, Reuters’ 3000extra market data platform has been merged with Thomson’s Tradeweb fixed income transaction viewer. Reuters’ news and messaging and Lipper Funds have been combined with the Thomson One wealth management platform.

The first product upgrades to come will benefit the wealth management community.

“We have begun an upgrade of the Reuters Plus customers to a new strategic wealth management product based on Thomson One,” Walton says. “We’ve just begun this process, we’re engaging with Reuters Plus customers now to help plan these upgrades.”

Later this year Thomson Reuters will introduce new product names and new branding and announce which desktop platforms and back-end infrastructure it will standardise on, the blog added. ■