Unified compliance data: Centralized disparate legacy data into a single Google Cloud lake for accurate, real-time reconciliation and insights
Automated visual insights: Replaced manual spreadsheets and documents with high granular review requirements with dynamic and customized Looker dashboards for global regulatory content
Accelerated innovation: Partnered with Bytecode to rapidly prototype and launch new products, optimizing architecture and speed-to-market
Security and scalability: Adopted a platform that facilitated implementation of best practice security protocol and scaled to meet required demand
Agentic platform: Established a foundation for agentic AI workflows to automate root cause analysis and corrective actions
Transforming tax compliance
with trusted data insights
Thomson Reuters has a broad portfolio of tax, trade, and compliance solutions, which have historically been managed by separate teams with independent processes within the compliance function. However, increased digitalization of tax and compliance, adoption of technology by authorities, and convergence of data required from a regulatory perspective across domains, has led to the lines between tax, trade, and finance teams becoming blurred. This has led to organizations needing to break down silos within their compliance function to ensure alignment in the data being submitted through various compliance processes, and an opportunity for Thomson Reuters to support with that task by providing a single pane through which a company’s compliance data across the entire compliance function can be analyzed, reviewed, and compared - helping overcome a key challenge faced by teams in this space today.
One of the key areas this new capability was most valuable was in the e-invoicing and indirect tax space, which saw increased global regulation. In this new environment, government authorities utilize advanced technologies to cross-reference every submission, comparing real-time transaction data against businesses' sanitized, periodic tax filings. Discrepancies between these two data streams, such as mismatches in tax amounts or classifications, can flag a business for audits, fines, and significant reputational damage. Thomson Reuters’ customers needed a way to validate their real-time invoices matched returns before authorities found errors, but they were often dependent on a chaotic maze of Excel sheets and disjointed systems, which offered zero central visibility and proved insufficient for keeping pace with this aggressive scrutiny.
To address these converging challenges, Thomson Reuters sought a flexible platform that could sit atop their consolidated data lake in Google Cloud. They needed a solution capable of handling the immense variability in compliance processes between different organizations. Looker was selected for its ability to provide "out-of-the-box" reconciliations and conversational analytics, while still allowing customers to customize reports for their specific business needs without requiring SQL expertise. This choice allowed Thomson Reuters to secure the necessary investment to solve the reconciliation problem while simultaneously modernizing their BI capabilities.
We realized we needed a platform to run on top of our data to give business insights and flexibility. Looker ended up being a really great fit because it allowed us to embed content and country specific regulatory context, while giving customers the ability to flex standard queries for meaningful insights.
Alex Bunnett
Product Manager, Thomson Reuters
Delivering confidence through
reconciliation and content
Thomson Reuters deployed Looker to drive critical use cases within their ONESOURCE platform, including Reconciliation and the Compliance Hub.
For Reconciliation, the primary goal was to bridge the gap between real-time invoice data and periodic tax reporting. In a typical scenario, a salesperson might record an expense with an incorrect tax classification in the source system. While compliance teams sanitize this data for period-end reporting, the real-time invoice sent to the government remains unchanged. Looker assists by querying Thomson Reuters’s common data library in BigQuery to efficiently identify specific discrepancies, such as differences in tax amounts, classifications, or missing records, allowing customers to visualize potential audit risks immediately. Looker’s flexibility enables Thomson Reuters to offer standard validation queries while empowering customers to define specific checks for unique business scenarios, such as flagging tax code mismatches for specific vendors in specific countries.
For the Compliance Hub, Thomson Reuters revolutionized how they manage and present regulatory content. Previously, internal teams relied on a time-consuming manual process of updating multiple unstructured Word documents to track changing global requirements. By structuring this expert-curated data in BigQuery and visualizing it with Looker, Thomson Reuters created a branded, one-stop-shop user experience. Non-technical users can now easily research global tax requirements, understand the impact of non-compliance, and access relevant resources through intuitive visualizations like world maps and tables.
Looking ahead, Thomson Reuters is launching the Reconciliation Agent, initially developed as part of collaboration with Google Cloud partner Bytecode to build a global Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to power an advanced network of AI agents and reconciliation skills. Supported by Bytecode’s architectural expertise in microservices and APIs, this next-generation capability moves far beyond simple insights.
Underpinned by comprehensive context models and integrated with LookML for precise query generation, these agents allow users to easily adapt insights to their unique business needs and data quality issues through a natural language interface.
Crucially, within the compliance space, reliability and context are paramount. This advanced AI capability is strictly grounded in sound compliance principles and tied directly to Thomson Reuters' expert-curated regulatory data. Instead of just surfacing data facts, these agents truly understand the underlying data and customer processes. They are designed to initiate intelligent, automated corrective workflows, addressing the root causes of issues upstream and making necessary adjustments downstream to ensure accurate reporting for the active compliance cycle.
Looker provides the mechanism to surface data insights, but the true value comes from integrating our subject matter expertise to define the business meaning behind the issues and automate corrective actions. That is where we see the biggest opportunity to save our customer’s time.
Alex Bunnett
Product Manager, Thomson Reuters
By driving these efficiencies through centralized data libraries and advanced BI tooling, Thomson Reuters is rapidly scaling compliance operations and accelerating tangible business value.
Thomson Reuters is a leading provider of business information services. Their products include highly specialized information-enabled software and tools for legal, tax, accounting, and compliance professionals combined with the world's most global news service.
Industry: Financial Services
Location: United States
Products: Google Cloud, Looker, BigQuery
About Google Cloud partner - Bytecode
Bytecode is a Google Cloud partner specializing in data and analytics. They accelerated Thomson Reuters' delivery by providing architectural expertise and rapid prototyping for new Looker-based products.
