As we could see, refinitiv get rid off almost all language desks and many client facing roles. I have a pleasure to work with Geneva, Nicosia and Gdynia russian desk and I can see very big difference comparing to Manila. Most of language desks are far above tier 1 support and could handle quite complicated queries, while 80% of Manilla staff do not use common sense at all and only thing they can do is escalating queries to next levels or bothering you by calling every hour with useless updates. There is still many countries where English is not so common (LATAM, Russia, France etc.) and I’m sure there will be a lot of cancellations here. If comparing to BBG, our data quality looks very poor and local support was the instance which was keeping customers with TR. Of course leadership does not understand it, looks like they are completely ignoring cultural context in their cuts.
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Completely crazy closing language centers! All low cost except Geneva. Products not ready for this huge move! Lots of quality issue , non friendly products, confidential information will be exposed to a Vendor. It has no sesnse at all . Tons of cancellations ahead! They should have fixed all issues before this change! Of course millions of dollars payed to consultants to come with such smart outcome
Last post is right to the point- but i would change “BS dont care” to “BS shouldnt care”.
Bloomberg kicked TR’s a-- without all the language support and BS is here to part out and sell FR, not do a cultural experiment.
Fun fact- all airplane pilot communication (
in every c---pit around the work is in english... did you know? Bet not!
Bloomberg does support in English only and anyway clients are not vegetable traders down the local market..
Its expected that they have command of the English language, Parisians included!
On the matter of knowledge manila are light years behind that's indeed a fact.
Bottom line BS don't care.
As far as I know Mandarin, Cantonese and Japan support will remain.
What I knew is that China desk is still safe with cutting several manager.
@1yor - pls do not forget, that you need to hire 50+ ppl in Manilla to replace language desks, so final economy would not be so big.
Anyway, time will show whether it was good decision. Of course Geneva was expensive, but locations like Gdynia, Nicosia or Buenos Aires have reasonable costs comparing to value.
In my own opinion impact on revenue by closing language desks was underestimated. Eikon looks very poor comparing to BBG (gaps in content, lot of bugs in apps like FIPA, swpr which could not be solved for years) I know customers who were raising >10 cases for the same repeating issue and every time content team was only correcting data instead of trying to find root cause. Also It’s a shame that we have different fx calendars for Eikon and DSS and could not make them compatible despite of many concerns from clients side. There are only few examples...
From the customer perspective in countries like Russia - we are increasing prices since January 2019 (average 7%) and closing support in local language. In the same time BBG introduce very aggressive price policy and is offering significant discounts for their terminal. Decision will be easy.
Even 20 cancels due to lack of language support will give around 30 000 usd/month revenue drop, this is more then keeping ~10 guys in locations like BA or Gdynia.
do the math
if a team with specific language skill cost you 100
and possible loss of clients that don't speak English gives you 50 income, what would you do?
wages and cost of a square meter are way higher in Geneva compare to Manila or even Gdynia
this is no longer Thomson Reuters, they don't care about reputation, its all about the money
Great thanks to the author of the post, really appreciated! It is super nice to read that our colleagues recognise our value.
Totally agree! We would call the lauguage desk to raise the cases, otherwise they will reach Manila and end up with helplessness.
They are not ignoring anything. Cultural context only matters in college. BS is not the same a c-appy s talking TR execs. These guys mean business and the business is making money (which in the end it always is, no matter what).
This is the real world. It didnt make enough money. What these cuts tell you is they dont want the products and they dont care if they die due to no support.
You need to leave TR