Brussels: EU antitrust regulators said today
that they are investigating whether Thomson Reuters Corp. is
breaking monopoly abuse rules by preventing customers from
applying their own codes to financial market data feeds.
The probe centres on real-time market data feeds on
trading prices that news and information provider Thomson
Reuters supplies to financial customers.
The European Commission says it wants to check if the
company locks in customers because it may make it difficult
for them to use their own or other software to translate the
Reuters Instrument Codes that identify the securities and
where they are traded.
Banks face "a long and costly procedure" to replace these
codes by reconfiguring or rewriting their own software,
regulators said.
There is no deadline to end the investigation. If
officials find evidence of antitrust abuse, they can demand
that a company change its behaviour under threat of fines of
up to 10 percent of its global turnover for every year that
the business broke the law.
Bureau Report
First Published: Tuesday, November 10, 2009, 18:32