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Tuesday, March 19, 2024

International data firm keeps hiring Filipinos despite pandemic

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Refinitiv, one of the world’s largest providers of financial market data and infrastructure, continues to hire Filipinos who can work-from-home to provide information to the global financial markets despite the health crisis.

International data firm keeps hiring Filipinos despite pandemic
Refinitive Manila co-site lead Jeff Dawis

Formerly known as Thomson Reuters, Refinitiv has 1,500 employees in its office along Upper McKinley Road in Taguig City.  When Metro Manila was placed under quarantine in mid-March, the company implemented a work-from-home mechanism called Virtual Office Environment to ensure the safety of the employees.

“We rolled out key initiatives to ensure our teams have the appropriate work-from-home setup by supporting them with their Internet connection, delivering office equipment in their respective residences and providing them with ergonomic home-office furniture. We made it safe and conducive for our colleagues to work from home and to continue supporting our customers. As a result, we have been able to maintain the same level of quality service to our customers and even exceeded key operational metrics including productivity and customer satisfaction targets,” says Jeff Dawis, the new Manila co-site lead of Refinitive together with Lei Buendia. 

“As we grow our capabilities and footprint in the Philippines, we continue to offer career opportunities to individuals who have the right passion and potential to develop world-class expertise in collecting, connecting, analyzing, interpreting and visualizing data to give it meaning, to power more transparent financial markets and drive a more sustainable world,” Dawis says via e-mail.

Refinitiv serves more than 40,000 institutions across 190 countries.  “We provide information, insights and technology that drive innovation and performance in global financial markets. We enable the financial community to trade smarter and faster, overcome regulatory challenges and scale intelligently,” Dawis says to explain what the company does.

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He says Refinitiv’s products and services focus on providing workflow solutions and real-time data analytics for asset management, investment banking, risk and compliance, trading and wealth management for financial institutions and similar markets. Its products include Refinitiv Workspace, an open desktop platform that provides access to financial data, news analytics and productivity tools; Datastream, with 70 years of financial data to help interpret market trends, economic cycles and the impact of world events; and World-Check One, a screening platform created to fight financial crime, bribery and corruption.

Refinitiv, which has headquarters in New York and London, has nearly 20,000 employees in about 70 countries, including 1,500 people in the Philippines. 

Dawis, who is also the concurrent director of order management in the Taguig office, has been with the company for 11 years, including nine years with Thomson Reuters before its merger with private equity firm Blackstone to become what it is today.

A licensed electronics and communications engineer from the University of Santo Tomas, Dawis shares the responsibility for overseeing site operations and ensuring that Refinitiv facilities are safe and legally compliant.  He is also responsible for managing a team of more than a hundred highly-skilled and experienced specialists who ensure the accurate and timely processing and fulfillment of client orders. 

Dawis says Refinitiv continues to expand in the Philippines and makes sure that employees are protected from the pandemic while fulfilling their tasks at home.  “We introduced an innovative, virtual onboarding solution for new employees that ensures a warm Day 1 welcoming experience, structured training plan, globally consistent assessment framework and immersive learning program. This is all part of the work-from-home strategy that we implemented to ensure employee safety during this global pandemic. Our Refinitiv colleagues take pride in our culture of being bold, open and focused which also serve as our core values,” he says.

Dawis says Refinitiv is more than a business process outsourcing company in the Philippines.  “Refinitiv’s operations are different from BPOs. Refinitiv is a private entity whose service lies on data management that connects global financial markets and communities. We provide leading data and insights, trading platforms and open data and technology that drive performance in trading, investment, wealth management, regulatory compliance, market data management, enterprise risk and fighting financial crime,” he says.

Prior to joining Refinitiv, Dawis held several roles in service delivery and operational management in a multinational technology company and technical support functions in various customer management and information management corporations.

He describes his 11-year experience with Refinitiv as both exciting and dynamic. “Such description has been shaped by the constant changes in the roles, teams and business units that I managed over time. I am very fortunate that the company has entrusted me with enough exposure and opportunities in developing my skills and expanding my scope of responsibilities both horizontally and vertically,” he says.

“As a matter of fact, I think I had assumed a new role or had moved to a different business function almost every two years, which provided me with new learnings and unique challenges. I also had the chance of working in our New York office in Times Square where I got exposed to the wider business of the organization,” says Dawis.

He says the COVID-19 pandemic has forced a lot of companies to modify strategies around business continuity, traditional work setup and employee and customer engagement.  “I expect that we will continue to ensure the safety of our employees by working from home while this health risk exists, and how we engage our customers and employees will remain generally virtual using proper technology,” he says.

Dawis says this is possible by investing in enhancements in technology such as strategic application dependency on virtual private network without compromising security, streamlining soft phone capabilities to ensure a seamless telephony experience and strengthening virtual conferencing solutions.

“Equally exciting that I look forward to later this year is the completion of the $27 billion deal between London Stock Exchange Group and Refinitiv. This deal will create leading capabilities across various financial market segments and is currently being reviewed by European Union regulators. I am fully confident that the combined companies will bring further opportunities to its employees and market-leading product and service offerings to its customers,” he says.

Dawis says he is grateful to be working for an organization that takes care about the wellbeing of its employees especially during these difficult and challenging times.

“Refinitiv has not only allowed us to work from home to ensure our safety, but we have also been provided with the right support to set up our home office capability, the right support to manage our own performance and development through virtual webinars and workshops and the right support to promote employee engagement. Most importantly, I feel extremely fortunate we still have our jobs despite the effects of the pandemic,” he says. 

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