Thomson Reuters has added an interactive map for monitoring the impact of weather, natural disasters and political events on commodity production and freight to its flagship desktop, Eikon. Interactive Map uses visualisation technology to provide an intuitive real-time picture of the commodities supply chain for metals and energy including oil, coal, gas and power.

Customers can use smart navigation tools to identify and monitor production plants, refineries and mines and identify the progress of shipping vessels around the globe. Custom filters can also be applied to search by commodity, region or operating status, the results of which can be extracted via excel or a visual snapshot and shared with colleagues.

“As visualisation capabilities continue to grow more sophisticated, financial firms are increasingly relying on real-time visual display functionality to help them refine their strategies,” says Rik Turner, senior analyst at Ovum. “In the commodities sub-vertical, using advanced map imagery to capture, understand and drill into various aspects, such as commodity freight and production and the impact of storms and natural disasters, enhances financial professionals’ ability to interact with that data, enabling them to make more informed trading decisions.”

“With Eikon we are harnessing advanced technology to present financial data in an incredibly simple, intuitive way. The simplicity really belies the complexity behind it,” comments Leigh Henson, head of energy, Thomson Reuters. “Interactive Map helps commodities professionals to stay ahead of the market and react to changes in weather patterns and political and geographical events which may alter production and delivery as we saw with the impact of Hurricane Sandy on East Coast US oil refineries recently. And the simple visualisation means they’ll get the picture instantly, quite literally.”

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