Refinitiv’s CodeBook targets financial programmers with built-in data access

Refinitiv has added new functionality to its recently-launched Workspace platform that automates the search and retrieval process of financial information. The extension is delivered through CodeBook, the Python programming environment for Workspace, and it is a data item browser that allows users to search for data fields directly within CodeBook.

“We have deployed our own native extension that allows you to look up instruments and data fields, and tweak different parameters that you would want to retrieve in your code in that specific extension,” says Leonid Sopotnitskiy, director of analytics platform open architecture at London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), which owns Refinitiv.

For example, if a user wanted to retrieve credit rating data about a debt issuer from Workspace, they would need to know whether they require a long-term or a short-term credit rating, and they might also need to specify if they require the data from a particular ratings agency, such as Moody’s, S&P Global Ratings or Fitch Ratings. Through the CodeBook extension, such information can be tweaked through different selectors and parameters within given data fields. For example, an analyst can select a single field for a long-term issuer credit rating, and for the source of the data pick from S&P Global Ratings.

“That will all be wrapped into a code snippet that you can then paste into the notebook. That will save you time versus doing all that manually,” Sopotnitskiy says.  

In capital markets, some traders or analysts write scripts in Python to automate their workflows. In the absence of a programming environment like CodeBook, they can use Excel through Microsoft’s Visual Basic for Applications. VBA is used to create macros—actions that can be run as many times as a user wants—in Excel and automate repetitive data processing tasks. 

“It’s a completely different quality of projects when you do it via a programming language than via just Excel,” Sopotnitskiy says. 

Refinitiv began rolling out Workspace in the fall of 2020. It is designed to provide distinct content and capabilities tailored to the needs of different types of users via a front-end display and APIs. Workspace will replace Refinitiv’s Eikon terminal.

The company soft-launched CodeBook last year. The cloud-hosted development environment for Python scripting offers access to Refinitiv’s data and is aimed at developers of all skill levels, including quants, data scientists and financial coders.

Before the introduction of CodeBook, Refinitiv clients could access data through the company’s API, including a Python API, as part of Eikon. Refinitiv’s specialists in client training and relationships would go to the IT or market data departments on behalf of a client, such as a bank, to ask for approval to install a Python library on the user’s machine.

“We actually had to carry it on a flash stick, insert it into the user’s machine, and install it physically every time. It simply was not scalable. Imagine how many customers we have and how many times our specialists would need to do that. It was an annoying task, and the business users were also quite annoyed with it,” Sopotnitskiy says. 

Refinitiv still offers APIs to coders, which a client must now license. “The key thing that changed with the introduction of CodeBook is that our customers do not need to install the API libraries on their desktop; they can easily access them via the product,” he says. 

CodeBook is Refinitiv’s adaptation of JupyterLab, an open-source, web-based development environment for document sharing app Jupyter Notebook. “The good thing about Jupyter—for us at least—is that it’s highly customizable, and that’s exactly what we have been doing with CodeBook. So when we introduced CodeBook, we wanted to retain a familiar interface that the vast majority of people would already know.”  

CodeBook currently only supports Python, but it is intended to be usable by developers of all skill levels.

In capital markets, coding is not necessarily a highly developed skill among all employees who would benefit from being able to build workflow apps with Refinitiv data. Cornelia Andersson, head of banking and capital markets at Refinitiv, says coding is still a nascent skill in banking, though it is more developed in other areas of finance. This is changing, as younger workers joining the industry tend to have more training in Python, she adds.

“They are not all super proficient, but they probably all had some exposure to it. And we believe there is a new breed here, and there’s going to be in the future a different way of interacting with data that may be less structured than the way it’s presented in a typical desktop today.”

Sopotnitskiy says Refinitiv will add more extensions to CodeBook to improve the usability of the product. “We would like CodeBook to have a deeper integration with other applications of Workspace, to deepen its integration with our products and our APIs. As we continue developing and delivering more APIs, more APIs will be exposed to CodeBook,” he says.