Making sense of Thomson One and Eikon

Many law firms and financial services professionals rely on Thomson Reuters financial products for corporate & financial research. The Thomson ONE financial database, in particular, is a favored platform among research experts.

Thomson is promoting its next-generation financial research product, Eikon, as a successor to Thomson ONE. Right now, Thomson Reuters positions Eikon as “the ultimate set of financial analysis tools” and Thomson ONE under Wealth Management Solutions for Advisors “so you can grow relationships, monitor your accounts, and help clients reach their goals.”

TR has also developed Eikon to be easier and more intuitive to use, with integrated workflows and more customization capabilities.

Both platforms offer the following features:

• Breaking market news and analysis from Reuters news service
• Stock market data, fundamentals and analyst research on over 22,000 companies
• Corporate intelligence including detailed governance and shareholder information, SEC filings, briefs and transcripts
• Thomson Reuters Datastream
• Private equity and venture capital tools with Cambridge benchmark calculator as a chargeable add-on
• Customized reports with integration to Microsoft Word and Excel
• Investment banking features including profiles of public and private companies with M&A activity and competitor information
• Mobile device applications

In addition to pricing and market data for traders of commodities, metals, agriculture, energy and fixed-income asset classes, Eikon also provides the following updated features:

• Eikon Messenger—instant messaging capability with more than 300,000 professionals in the global financial community in 180 countries. Free to Eikon subscribers with no setup costs
• Eikon for Commodities—commodity trading solution
• Country-specific market overviews
• Eikon Answers—natural language search engine
• Foreign exchange homepage with indices for 175 currencies
• Interactive charts and “heatmaps”
• StarMine SmartEstimates—predictive analytics program ranking each financial analyst’s performance based on a unique, patented method
• Customizable alerts as prices change for stocks, hedge funds, foreign exchange, with breaking corporate news
• Access to Autex Trade Route and Tradeweb
• FXall for forex trading
• Social Media Monitor to track the buzz on stocks
• App Studio—specialized apps built by third-party providers integrated with Eikon capabilities, allows access to multiple apps in a single workspace and eliminates the need for multiple usernames and passwords with a uniform sign-on

Mobile apps

Eikon also promises to improve on the Thomson ONE Anywhere mobile app, offering the same real-time stock quotes and market news with Eikon for Mobile, in addition to a “briefcase” feature that can save and store reports and news for offline access. The Anywhere app is available for both Android and Apple iOS mobile devices.

Eikon setup and support

There is no need to install software to access Eikon’s content, news, apps and workflow, but download and installation is necessary for the full Eikon desktop experience. For Apple lovers, note the program cannot be natively installed on a Mac desktop.

Thomson offers one-on-one customized training and setup support, with preparatory systems testing and files assessment. Online tutorials are also available.

Reviews

Thomson ONE gets generally positive user reviews  for basic research capability at an affordable price compared to competitors. Since Eikon is fairly new, there are relatively few online user reviews yet. One user calls it “somewhat more intuitive to use” than Bloomberg and FactSet and “if you’ve used Thomson One you’ll quickly pick this up,” but others call the interface and search functionality difficult and clunky.

It does get points for sell-side research and up-to-date analytics for multi-asset portfolios, as well as being less costly than Bloomberg.

Another option in the financial research space is Capital IQ from Standard & Poor’s. We’ve been doing some comparative research between Cap IQ and Thomson ONE and decided to turn it into a report that will be available for download at the end of this year.