Refinitiv Combines Two Coronavirus Eikon Applications

Refinitiv’s two applications that track the coronavirus pandemic will be combined, and are available as one app on the Eikon terminal starting this week.

“We combined the two applications because many customers were interested in the information in both of them,” says John Dioufas, director of macro and economics product at Refinitiv.

In late January, as the World Health Organization declared the Covid-19 outbreak a public health emergency, Refinitiv launched a coronavirus-themed app for the Eikon terminal that tracks pandemic-related headlines, charts, data, and market analysis. In late March, after the disease had become a full-blown global pandemic, the company released its Macro Vitals app to record the macroeconomic impact of the crisis to help, in part, central banks make fiscal and monetary policy interventions.

“The idea behind that was to give a macro feel, so a very high-level view, but still supporting the top-down analysis workflows, to give the users a feel for what’s happening in the world of financial markets. What is the news flow looking like? What is the impact on the markets? What are the different responses: Will there be a monetary policy response from central banks, or a fiscal policy response from governments?” Dioufas says.

Dioufas says the combined app now has two types of news flow, one that is macroeconomic and financial markets-focused, and one that is focused on news that is specific to the virus, such as tests, vaccine news, and which pharmaceutical firms are at the forefront of the vaccine development. Refinitiv works with an economic consultancy called Fathom Consulting, which provides macroeconomic analysis that is fed into the app.

The combined app has retained a feature that Dioufas says is most used: a case tracker, “which tracks countries on a global level, with regional and country-level detail.”

Also from this week, the app will be include more news about Middle Eastern and North African economies. “Most of those countries derive vast amounts of their national income from the extraction and sale of crude oil and natural gas. And now the prices for energy have basically collapsed. Now we have this oversupply and lack of demand. We continue to enhance the application to reflect these things,” he says.

Dioufas says users are going to start needing to know how the world’s economies are recovering post–Covid-19. 

“China is now coming out of their lockdown and their economy is starting to open up again. So we’re entering a new phase in the crisis and customers are looking closely to see what the economic numbers coming out of China are going to look like,” he says.

Tracking Credit  

The next big demand from users of the app will be for data that tracks credit, as investors try to understand the exposure financial institutions have to consumer debt and small business defaults during a time of widespread and sudden unemployment, Andrea Stone, chief customer propositions officer at Refinitiv, tells WatersTechnology.

According to Refinitiv CEO David Craig, the company saw an eightfold increase in demand for data in February and March on mortgage-backed securities over the past several months, as compared to November and December 2019, as investors try to understand the impact that mortgage defaults could have.

“What’s more revealing is that demand for this dataset outstripped demand for information on company fundamentals—including corporate debt,” Craig wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Is it possible that, for all the media focus on the vulnerability of the highly leveraged corporate sector, investors’ more immediate concern is what’s happening at the household level?”

FX Volatility

Another market that has experienced record volatility due to the coronavirus is foreign exchange (FX). As our sibling publication FX Markets recently noted, “[on February 24], one-month at-the-money volatility for euro/US dollar was at 5.33—by March 19, it was at 14.91. The spot EUR/USD rate was at 1.0854—just about to rocket up to 1.145 and then back down to 1.0692 in the space of three weeks.”

FX trading platforms have also experienced record average daily volume (ADV) in the months since the pandemic took hold. According to Refinitiv data, in March, ADV was $540 billion across all its FX platforms, a new record high since it began publishing volumes in 2009. This includes spot, forwards, swaps options, and non-deliverable forwards (NDFs). ADV for spot FX across all platforms was $141 billion in March, the highest since September 2014.

“In the first three months of the year to March 30, we saw the same notional amount that we saw in the previous six months,” Stone says. “That just shows you how active the central banks have been with these instruments, using this sort of open-outcry model through our system.”

The company has seen a surge in demand from central banks, around Eikon’s Auctions facility, as they move to pacify markets with monetary policy interventions. The Auctions platform acts as a trading venue for central bank auctions. The Indonesian central bank, for example, is using Auctions for domestic NDFs, an alternative hedging instrument for market participants.

“Refintiv works with a number of central banks, and we have seen record high use of auctions and call-outs to stabilize currencies and participate in open market interventions around money flows,” Stone says. “We had a central bank, which was using us for FX, call us up and within three hours were using our auction capability in money markets because of what was going on in one day.”