Thomson Reuters | Thomson Reuters Contex

Financial

Contributions Exchange for External Contributions

Contex is the market leading multi-vendor contributions system used by the majority of the leading banks and brokers for contributed OTC data delivery to preferred venues such as: Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, Fininfo, IDC and many other destinations.

Overview
Tech Specs
Legacy Gissing Products

Why Choose Contex?

Replace a variety of disparate tools with one robust solution
Reduce system resources and costs
Minimise administration and management resources

Key Features

Designed for the delivery of high value content to external destinations
Maps and reformats internally distributed real-time content created by pricing and publishing applications into appropriate protocols
Supports rapid delivery to external venues and applications (e.g. non exchange traded data such as Fixed Income, Foreign Exchange and Derivative prices, although all asset classes are supported)
High performance fault tolerant system providing maximum resiliency in the event of hardware or network failure
Provides all administration tools needed to ensure prices are managed and delivered as efficiently as possible

Thomson Reuters Contex is a software based multi-vendor contribution platform, designed to take data from one or more input sources and to contribute that data to one or more output destinations in the appropriate format using the appropriate protocols.

Components

System of input and output handlers, each running as separate processes, managed by central kernel process
Configuration Service provides configuration data to the handlers allowing the configuration to be changed dynamically
Status & Control Service permits handlers to receive control instructions via the Status GUI allowing all components to pass status information around the system
Contex System Manager manages services and kernel and controls fault tolerance

Data Services

Each input handler receives data in the format that it supports and converts it to a generic record-based structure (the Contex Data Model) that is understood by the whole system. At this point the following services may be used depending on configuration of the system.

Validation Service: Validation of the data
Derived Data Service: Calculating derived data
Page Formatting Service: Creating pages from logical records, shredding pages into logical records

Once the update has been processed it is addressed and sent to the Kernel for routing to the output handlers registered to receive it.

Data Processing

Each interested output handler:

receives the new data in the generic structure
maps it to the format required by the output destination that it supports
validates or adds derived data if chosen
applies formatting rules if chosen (i.e. number of decimal places, date format, etc.)

Once processed, the data is sent to the destination supported by that handler.

Status of Legacy Gissing Products

Gissing Software Ltd was acquired by Reuters in January 2008 and since January 2010 ceased to be a separate entity and is now part of Thomson Reuters.

The legacy Gissing products have been withdrawn from sale to new customers but are still fully supported for existing customers.