"We are delighted to build a bridge between UCL world class academic environment and financial services industry, for this, the fourth year running. Thomson Reuters is a dynamic organization that is embedded in the global financial services industry. Despite the current economic environment, many UCL students have ambitions to work in financial services, be it in developed or emerging markets. Thomson Reuters has chosen to partner with UCL Computer Science and taken 12 CS software system engineering interns, assigning them with business critical roles over the last four months. I am confident that this is an extremely effective way to prepare the CS grads for the high pressure finance environment, and to put into practice the academic work of the last year. CS alumni are well placed in all the top global financial firms” said Donald Lawrence, a banker/UCL research collaboration Project Manager.

Allan McNichol, Global Head of Desktop Platform Group, Sales &Trading Division for Thomson Reuters comments, Thomson Reuters Markets is getting ready to release its next generation financial markets desktop – Project Utah. Project Utah is more comprehensive, innovative, and collaborative product that Thomson Reuters has ever delivered. It is the cumulative effort of more than 1000 engineers working around the world over the last three years. Project Utah delivers a new common platform for all Thomson Reuters products which is global, simplified, scalable, reliable, and provides a new web-like, intuitive customer experience that is closely tailored to the workflow of today’s financial professionals.

Going along with the innovative spirit of Utah, Thomson Reuters decided to collaborate with students from the University College London in an effort to add new ideas and passionate minds to the making of Project Utah. Alan Schwarzenberger, an Implementation Manager with Thomson Reuters Markets, worked closely with the MSc students and was able to provide some background information on the students’ projects and how they were able to integrate themselves into the Thomson Reuters Markets world.

“The build and configuration of the servers that make up the Project Utah platform is defined by outputs from a configuration database. Thomson Reuters created a project for the MSc Students to work on potential enhancements to this configuration database. Four students took on this challenge as their group project and worked full time cranking out ideas from the end of April through to early September. Collaborating on an MSc Project rather than doing this internally gave Thomson Reuters the opportunity to explore in a very practical way a number of potential areas for enhancements and allowed us to try some slightly more speculative and innovative solutions. The students brought both fresh insights to the problems as well as software engineering methodologies that they learned in their coursework earlier in the year. The students’ project successfully delivered a number of “proofs of concepts” and their work paid off – As the MSc project ends, Thomson Reuters is establishing an internal follow up implementation project to deliver some of these “proofs of concepts” as real enhancements to the live configuration database”.

This successful collaboration between UCL and Thomson Reuters has been a valuable experience to all and has helped ensure Project Utah will be a great success.