Thomson Reuters’ significant investment into its high-profile desktop platform is beginning to pay off.

Launched with great fanfare in 2010, the Eikon multi-asset class desktop information and trading platform was an effort to win back market share from its heavyweight rival Bloomberg. After a stuttering start, Eikon has seen a rapid uptake from traders and investors in recent months. Thomson Reuters says it had over 42,000 paying customers using its terminal at the end of January, up from just 25,600 in September.

And it is the recent revamps to Eikon that are most appealing to customers. The upgrades to Eikon have been designed to make the system simpler and more intuitive with new tools including a predictive semantic word search that means users no longer have to remember long-winded trade codes to access the information they need.

“The amount of content in Eikon is mind blowing, but we aim to give a user-friendly experience,” said Phillip Brittan, head of Eikon.

“What we are doing with Eikon is to put all of the data that you want in one place and visualize it. Previously, it was hard to get data that you wanted that was customized for your query in one place and at one time because of the index card approach that everyone was taking where your data could be on about five different pages.

“What we are doing with Eikon, it really is quite a breakthrough. It’s resonating incredibly well with customers.”

Bloomberg, too, which has over 300,000 terminals deployed in the financial services sector, has recently revamped its terminal by cutting the functions available by half as a battle is beginning to develop to improve the usability of terminals in the trading realm.

Eikon, though, is hopeful that it can continue its upward march despite a challenging environment.

“There are less customers buying products and the market is certainly depressed overall because of cost-cutting by our customers,” said Brittan.

“But we don’t see the market downturn really as a disadvantage as we are offering a very compelling offering which is also value for money and bringing innovation to the market.”

Thomson Reuters recently signed a three-year deal with the European Central Bank to roll out the Eikon desktops across the ECB and participating national central banks in the region.

“We are getting great feedback from our customers regarding usability and performance in Eikon as well as excitement around innovations we are making in areas such as search and visualization,” said Peter Moss, managing director of trading at Thomson Reuters.

“Our customers recognize how simple we have made it to navigate and analyze the unrivaled depth of content we have which alongside key social tools and advanced analytics makes for a very powerful one-stop solution.”