Thomson Reuters’ New AIgorithmic Research Capability…For Finance

Global professional publisher and software company, Thomson Reuters, has launched a new algorithmic research service aimed at the financial sector, in a move that shows the increasing use of machine learning, NLP and related tech by one of the world’s largest knowledge companies.

The new research product is named Eikon Digest, a proprietary personalised service containing the ‘most significant news, research, data and information from Thomson Reuters Eikon’, its financial desktop platform. This naturally will be of use to investors, but also to many lawyers working in the financial services sector and who need to be able to trawl through huge data and news stores for business sensitive information that may be relevant to their clients and the legal opinions they may be giving them.

The move follows other use cases for similar tech across the vast corporation, with legal AI company eBrevia recently being chosen to support automated doc review in Thomson Reuters’ managed legal services arm.

The company has also launched a machine learning system that performs ‘sentiment analysis’ to help people better trade the top 100 cryptocurrencies.

And they also recently launched a contract remediation system to help companies review and repaper legal agreements ahead of Brexit. In this case it is using AI company Logical Construct, which leverages a combination of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques to achieve its extraction results.

In short, Thomson Reuters is now showing a clear strategy of leveraging this type of technology to provide its clients with greater data insights and more efficiency in their research work.

In this case, the Eikon Digest product uses an ‘AI algorithm [that] identifies significant company news including earnings, mergers, acquisitions, product launches, controversies, and incorporates news sentiment, top news, and most read articles into one digestible newsletter’, said the company – although they didn’t explain in detail what this entailed in terms of the tech behind the algorithmic approach and whether/or how it was using NLP and machine learning.

It’s also an interesting move when seen in the context of the growth of machine learning news research company Signal Media, which Artificial Lawyer profiled recently. I.e. that Thomson Reuters is not allowing a wide range of startups to ‘eat its lunch’, given that it is the repository, and often the source, of a huge quantity of legal and economic data.

The company added: ‘[This] builds on the strength of Reuters News…and leverages a unique combination of artificial intelligence and Reuters editorial curation.’

‘[It uses] AI algorithms that sift through terabytes upon terabytes of news and data to deliver personalized information according to the company list/portfolio, industry sector, language, content entitlements and regions that interest clients the most,’ the company added.

Some of the features include:

  • Research and Events – Algorithm sifts through terabytes of the latest research and events.
  • Significance – Algorithm that identifies significant company news such as news about earnings, mergers and acquisitions, product launches and controversies.
  • De-duplication and Clustering – identifies and consolidates duplicate and similar stories such as news events covered by multiple sources.

Commenting on the new product launch, Ian Brocklehurst, global product head, Financial and Risk, Thomson Reuters, said: ‘Eikon Digest represents a new way for our clients to see the markets through our AI algorithms and benefit by staying ahead of changing trends, whether in the office or on the move. Over the coming months we plan to include additional content such as estimates, StarMine data, filings, and other features.’