Thomson Reuters Partners with Finbourne for Cloud Investment Platform

Thomson Reuters’ clients will use the platform to manage their portfolio and transaction data, which will incorporate Lusid’s event-based ledger system. The technology allows for a bi-temporal view of data, in which data can be viewed as it existed at any point in its history.

Pradeep Menon, global head of investing and advisory at Thomson Reuters, says: “The technology and fit to our technical stack, the market experience of the team that started Finbourne, time to market and the scalability of the end solution” were all key factors in deciding to use Lusid, which will be “an integral part of the portfolio analytics solution” in the company’s Eikon platform.

Finbourne, founded by bank veterans including senior technologists from UBS, Morgan Stanley and other institutions, has an existing relationship with Thomson Reuters, having been backed by the information and tech provider at an early stage after its incorporation in 2016.

Dermot Shortt, CEO and co-founder of Finbourne, and the former head of UBS Delta, describes Thomson Reuters as “a great partner” up to this point, but says the deal marks “a significant turning point in the relationship.”

“We believe the investment industry has woken up to the fact that institutions need to save their IT firepower for technology which genuinely sets them apart from their peers, and not waste their clients’ money on ‘utility’ functionality. Historically, the buy side hasn’t been as good as the sell-side when it comes to mutualising costs – banks were sharing back offices years ago,” he says.

Finbourne has had a busy year to date, after releasing software development kits in various languages onto popular software community github, and publishing its application programming interface (API) documentation.

Looking ahead, says CTO Tom McHugh, the firm is preparing to release a sandbox environment where developers are able to test various code packages. In addition to Thomson Reuters, McHugh says, Finbourne is also working with “a large asset servicer and some vendors,” which he says ties in with the firm’s objective of Lusid being available on an open basis.

On a higher strategic level, the objective for Finbourne is “straightforward,” Shortt says. “[We want] to build an open platform to host investment data so that we can lower infrastructure and integration costs, and let more vendors offer their services into client portfolios. We publish all our APIs to make sure everyone can understand clearly how to interact with Lusid. To have an institution the size of Thomson Reuters acknowledge this as part of their ‘open platform’ strategy is a huge validation for our model.”

The integration of Lusid is expected to be in production by the first quarter of 2019.