Matt Eddy, Head of Real-Time Delivery & Integration at Refinitiv, discusses how a new service – Refinitiv Real-Time – Optimized – is helping cloud-native firms and organisations with more complex, legacy infrastructures alike to engage with market data in the cloud.
- Firms around the world are either using market data in the cloud today, or plan to migrate to the cloud as part of their market data strategy.
- The Refinitiv Real-Time – Optimized service – launched at the end of 2020 – is enabling firms to shift to the cloud quickly and easily.
- This exciting new service, which is delivered via the Refinitiv Data Platform, is continuing to evolve alongside new customer use cases.
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Lao Tzu – the Chinese philosopher, writer and founder of Taoism in the 6th century BCE – certainly wasn’t thinking about market data migrations and the transformative effect that the public cloud is having on financial services firms, but his words – “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” – still ring true today. They perfectly capture the approach we are seeing from our clients, partners and third parties within our industry around moving to the cloud.
The public cloud is a major disruptive event that is redefining the financial services industry as well as our entire digital world.
More than 90 percent of financial services firms want to migrate to the cloud in the next four years, and 25 percent are aiming to use it for the majority of their market data needs within the next year.
However, we recognise that every individual organisation will have their own cloud use cases, and that while a small number of financial services firms may be ‘born in the cloud’, many others are facing the need to move large and complex market data infrastructures to the cloud over a period of time.
At Refinitiv, we are focused on supporting firms as they work in or shift to the cloud. We are increasing the datasets and abilities of the cloud-based Refinitiv Data Platform, and will continue to do so throughout 2021.
The Refinitiv Data Platform already contains a huge range of trusted data sources, making it easier for you to see relationships and perform analyses with our natural language processing (NLP) engine and Intelligent Tagging capabilities.
Also, it enables financial firms to reduce data management resources and costs by leveraging a common data model, symbology mapping tools, and our comprehensive financial instrument identifiers powered by our open identifier, PermID.
Exploring new possibilities
In late 2020, we launched Refinitiv Real-Time – Optimized, our new all-trade, quote conflated solution delivered via the Refinitiv Data Platform, in the cloud.
Real-Time – Optimized supports rapid application development of cloud-native and cloud-adopting firms, and also will make the migration of more complex market data estates to the cloud simpler and faster.
This new service builds on the tremendous popularity of Elektron Real-Time in the Cloud, launched back in 2018. That service, hosted from Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres in Virginia and Dublin, was the first truly global, consolidated market data feed that customers could connect to from anywhere on the internet.
Customers were able to easily consume our entire universe of real-time data, exclusive news and other proprietary datasets via a lightweight industry-standard websockets connection.
Real-Time – Optimized pushes that innovation much further. With a single Refinitiv ID, a firm can access all of the data held on the Refinitiv Data Platform to use in its business workflow. Data capacity is expanded as well, with up to 500,000 items per ID. Additionally, the service was launched in Singapore earlier in 2020.
Flexibility is also enhanced in other ways. With Real-Time – Optimized, customers can engage with a symbology lookup API that enables them to build their subscription lists using SEDOL, ISIN and other identification codes, alongside the Refinitiv Instrument Code (RIC) identifier.
For customers with lighter weight application requirements, Real-Time – Optimized’s websockets enable them to connect and start pulling in data with a few lines of code.
For clients with more demanding workload requirements, the Refinitiv Real-Time SDK provides a suite of APIs for different use cases and levels of programming sophistication. The Refinitiv Developer Community website, which is free-to-register for, highlights the options open to you based on the business challenge you are facing.
Also, for customers who have a requirement for backwards compatibility for their legacy applications, Refinitiv Real-Time Optimized can be delivered through the Refinitiv Real-Time Distribution System, too.
Operational resilience needs for market data are continuing to change, and Real-Time – Optimized will help meet and exceed those emerging requirements, with extra layers of resiliency, redundancy and capacity baked in. The service also adheres to cloud best practices and offers a range of industry-standard programming language options.
Market data in the future
The use cases for market data in the cloud continue to develop for firms, as does the overall cloud computing landscape, and so the Real-Time – Optimized service will continue to evolve, too.
In 2021, we will be adding in new points of presence for our customers to connect to – including Ohio and Tokyo (with Frankfurt in early 2022) – on top of our existing locations of Virginia, Dublin and Singapore.
In parallel, to recognise their more demanding workloads and the importance our customers rightly place on their real-time data, Refinitiv will be launching new connectivity offerings in 2021 to complement the AWS Direct Connect and AWS Private Link services launched for Real-Time – Optimized in 2020.
With these new offerings, it will not matter where you are in the world – on-premise or off-premise, or in any cloud provider – you will get robust, secure, resilient, commercially competitive connectivity to Real-Time – Optimized and all our Refinitiv services.
There is so much more to come from Refinitiv Real-Time over the next 24 months. We hope the information above about market data in the cloud, including the launch and future development plans of Real-Time – Optimized, will help firms shape their market data strategies. If you would like to speak with us more, please do reach out to us.
Whether you are on mile one or mile one hundred, we believe Real-Time – Optimized will help you get to the end of that journey, faster, easier and with the reassurance of Refinitiv’s trusted data, service and support backing you all the way.
