The global managing director of the wealth management markets division at the news and data service, Thomson Reuters, predicts that the worst may be over for the wealth industry, according to an interview with Wall Street & Technology.

“The finger's come off the panic button,"  John Fennelly told the publication.  He continued: "In September through January, everybody was extremely nervous; who knew what equilibrium would look like?"

"We're hanging in there," he was quoted as saying. "It's a different business environment than we had a year ago. There's been tremendous dislocation, a lot of brokers are changing firms, but we have not seen a huge degradation in users," he said.

Mr Fennelly said that wealth management had not experienced the meltdown that's occurred elsewhere in investment banking and that the merger has given the combined firm a bigger wealth management presence.

On the desktop side - mainly the Thomson One Wealth Management product - Mr Fennelly said the company will continue to add and improve workflow tools, including some that will incorporate Lipper mutual fund ratings and classifications.

"Thomson had started to talk to Lipper before the merger," Fennelly said. Since Lipper is a subsidiary of Reuters, now the companies are all members of the same family. Thomson Reuters also recently acquired a set of asset allocation, financial planning and portfolio modeling tools called eXimius that may interest customers seeking more sophisticated data analyses to use and share with customers.

Turbulence in the markets has been causing a surge in the number of clients running performance reports and client reviews, Mr Fennelly said.

"We've seen spikes in report generation and an overall increase in high-touch demand," he says. (The company recently added new reporting features to Thomson One.) Market turmoil also brings about a need for good customer relationship management tools to help advisers deal with semi-panicked clients. Thomson Reuters partnered with Salesforce for its CRM capabilities last year. "We've embraced cloud computing with Salesforce and integrated the software with Thomson One," he said.

On the transaction processing side of its wealth management unit, Thomson Reuters hopes to gain new clients for its brokerage processing business, Beta Systems, this year. "We can save tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, for clients that outsource to us rather than doing it all in-house," Mr Fennelly said.

For the third leg of his business — hosted news, market data and content for advisers and their clients called Reuters Knowledge Direct for Wealth Management — Mr Fennelly said he plans to continue adding new types of content and to sell the service to more brokerage firms.