Thomson Reuters is to make its proprietary Reuters Instrument Codes available beyond its desktops and feeds for use across the trade processing lifecycle by both customers and non-customers.
The move comes in the wake of long-running anti-trust proceedings against the vendor by the European Commission over licensing fees and prohibitions placed on market participants from using RICs for post-trade mapping and cross-referencing.
But with the push for a universal Legal Entity Identifier and a renewed regulatory focus on data management issues, Thomson Reuters has decided to follows it rival Bloomberg in making its proprietary symbology available to market participants without the need for any other subscription products from the company.
Bats Chi-X Europe has already agreed to use the extended transaction processing license for Reuters' alphanumeric codes across its own platform.
Paul O'Donnell, chief operating officer, at the Exchange says: "Cross referencing the Bats Chi-X Europe instrument codes with the Thomson Reuters RIC symbols will enable us to reach new market participants as well as improve efficiency and data transparency by facilitating accurate identification of securities on our platform."
Thomson Reuters pricing and reference data customers will also be free, under an extended securities processing license, to use RICs to reference and retrieve securities data from their securities master databases and navigate to connected content such as legal entity information.
Gerry Buggy, global head of enterprise content at Thomson Reuters, says: "By offering the RIC to all market participants Thomson Reuters promotes operational efficiencies and supports competitive advantage as financial market participants can more reliably communicate with each other and capture more order flow."