Targeted at the private investor, Reuters Investor Service (RIS) is a leading product in Reuters strategy for the retail market place. Reuters Investor enables its clients to incorporate Reuters news, market data and charts within their own financial web sites. Since its launch, RIS has signed up over 500 banking, e-brokerage and financial portal clients who wish to provide financial information to their customers to support their trading and investment decisions.
RIS enables investors to gain access, via their favourite portal, to the vast wealth of information contained within the Reuters global financial information warehouse. Given the enormous breadth and depth of the Reuters financial databases, finding the right information is not always a trivial task, particularly for a private investor who may not be familiar with the myriad of company and instrument coding schemes. To overcome this limitation the Retail Financial Solutions team in Geneva collaborated with a team from Cybercom to specify, design and implement a powerful search capability - PowerSearch.
PowerSearch offers unique features to making finding companies and instruments quicker and easier using techniques such as sounds-like, alias names, coding schemes, index and sector members. So if all you know is that the company has a name that sounds like 'Rooters', or is referred to as GM, or is a member of the telecom sector on the Australian exchange, PowerSearch will do the rest.
The Cybercom team, led by Dai Reynolds, worked alongside the Retail Financial Solutions team in Geneva, to specify, design and implement the underlying search database; integrate the database with various incoming datafeeds and transition the system into an operational state. Jean Louis Truquet, Managing Director of Retail Financial Solutions at Reuters, described the partnership in this way "This project wouldn't have happened without the synergy between the Reuters team and Cybercom team. Although we knew Cybercom had the right mix of skills and expertise, it was also the soft skills that helped deliver this project".
Simon Wellard, the Product Manager at Retail Financial Solutions and the driving force behind PowerSearch, expressed his confidence in the Cybercom approach. "We had absolute confidence in Dai's ability to translate our business requirements into a performant design. Equally we had absolute trust that Mike Ferguson had the capability to implement the design and make PowerSearch an operational reality"
Development of the PowerSearch functionality and operational implementation was project managed by Cybercom. As described by Philipp Fasching, the Retail Financial Solutions Marketing Director, "the Cybercom project manager kept us focused, raised the flags at the right moments and really did care about the outcome".