Thomson Investment Banking Solutions Group Partners with Clients on Proprietary Development, Integration Initiatives (ARTICLES)

Abstract (Summary)
NEW YORK, Sept. 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Thomson Financial, an operating unit of The Thomson Corporation (NYSE: TOC; TSX: TOC), and leading provider of information and technology solutions to the worldwide financial community, today announced the formal organization of the Thomson Investment Banking Solutions (TIBS) group. Leveraging Thomson's 30 years of content management experience and established technology infrastructure, the TIBS group partners with Thomson's investment banking clients to build and customize content-rich, scalable applications for accessing financial and business information.
Using a consultative approach, TIBS product and technology teams operate with a deep understanding of how content is managed and used in clients' businesses. The TIBS group benefits from Thomson's historical experience managing the complexities of integrating disparate data sets into proprietary applications. Thomson offers a range of development levels -- from simply providing raw data through open system access to designing and building complete customized solutions that directly reflect the client's workflow and integrate into their existing technology environment. For many clients, the outsourcing of data management provides a significant operational cost savings, and speed to market for integrated applications.
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Copyright PR Newswire - NY Sep 26, 2002
Experienced Thomson Team Building and Deploying Technology and Information Solutions at Investment Banks; Using Consultative Approach in Developing
Content-rich Scalable Applications
NEW YORK, Sept. 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Thomson Financial, an operating unit of The Thomson Corporation (NYSE: TOC; TSX: TOC), and leading provider of information and technology solutions to the worldwide financial community, today announced the formal organization of the Thomson Investment Banking Solutions (TIBS) group. Leveraging Thomson's 30 years of content management experience and established technology infrastructure, the TIBS group partners with Thomson's investment banking clients to build and customize content-rich, scalable applications for accessing financial and business information.
Using a consultative approach, TIBS product and technology teams operate with a deep understanding of how content is managed and used in clients' businesses. The TIBS group benefits from Thomson's historical experience managing the complexities of integrating disparate data sets into proprietary applications. Thomson offers a range of development levels -- from simply providing raw data through open system access to designing and building complete customized solutions that directly reflect the client's workflow and integrate into their existing technology environment. For many clients, the outsourcing of data management provides a significant operational cost savings, and speed to market for integrated applications.
The team's investment banking domain expertise forms the core of TIBS, backed up by Thomson's content and data-integration tools. This technology suite includes components such as TKO, a universal searching system across all Thomson Financial content, the Press, a high speed caching architecture, and a vast library of pre-built but customizable investment banking-specific content components that easily blend with third party or proprietary information. Typically, the resulting application for enterprise-wide data distribution and integration is delivered via an internal enterprise network or intranet/extranet.
Authoritative content drawn from across Thomson Financial includes company filings, fundamentals and ratios, brokerage and market research reports, delayed and real-time security prices, corporate transaction data and ownership information, company earnings data and news. The ability to create new or customized applications allows bankers and information professionals to retrieve "current-awareness" information on companies as well as to perform in-depth research.
"Thomson is the logical choice for any global investment bank seeking to derive efficiencies from partnering or outsourcing, since we are already a leading provider of content and analysis used by banks in their advisory process," said Mark Lerch, president of the Thomson Financial Investment Banking Group. "TIBS already has been successful in implementing solutions for several top clients," he added. "Our banking clients want to create scalable applications that better fit their workflow, rather than adapt their workflow to vendor software. We help streamline workflow, create competitive advantages around workflow and the use of information, and reduce costs associated with multiple system maintenance," said Lerch.
"In the past, investment banks have had little choice other than to build integrated knowledge systems largely from scratch," said Kenneth Read, executive vice president, Thomson Financial Investment Banking Group and head of the TIBS group which includes top talent drawn from the investment banking arena. "Technology had not evolved to the point where open, distributed systems were stable, scalable and secure enough. Also, small players could not deliver integrated solutions on the scale required," said Read. "Given the consolidation in the information industry and improvement in technology, investment banks now have the opportunity to look to gain efficiencies through partnering with Thomson," he added.
About Thomson Financial
Thomson Financial is a US$1.6 billion provider of information and technology solutions to the worldwide financial community. Through the widest range of products and services in the industry, Thomson Financial helps clients in more than 70 countries make better decisions, be more productive and achieve superior results. Thomson Financial is part of The Thomson Corporation (www.thomson.com), a leading provider of value-added information, software applications and tools to more than 20 million users in the fields of law, tax, accounting, financial services, higher education, reference information, corporate training and assessment, scientific research and healthcare. The Corporation reported 2001 revenues of US$7.2 billion and its common shares are listed on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges (NYSE: TOC; TSX: TOC).