Waters Rankings 2017: Best Buy-Side Execution Management System Provider— Eze Software Group

Eze EMS, which has a storied history in the capital markets through its previous name, RealTick, remains the EMS of choice for many buy-side traders. Over the past year, Eze has continued to invest in its platform strategy across its primary tools: Eze EMS; Eze OMS, its order management system (OMS), which won that category in this year’s Rankings; and its portfolio accounting platform, Tradar.

The deep integration between EMS and OMS has been the biggest story however, according to Bill Neuman, head of product at the firm. This isn’t just a casual link between the two platforms, in the way that Eze allows so-called “arm’s-length” integrations with third-party platforms, but is instead a thorough joining of the different capabilities in each system.

The new functionality stretches from execution support and inventory management through to compliance, and eliminates problematic workflow issues that have previously arisen from OMS and EMS integration in the past, such as having to manually enter securities for execution that have previously been unknown to the EMS, but are included in the OMS drop copy.

“Most recently, what we’ve been working on is deep integration. So, if I’m working in the EMS and executing any kind of a trade, the compliance capability, position checking, things that require an up-to-the-second understanding of all the positions that exist primarily in the OMS, the integration between the two checks that on the fly,” he says.

Eze also partnered with OTAS Analytics in March this year, plugging the firm’s tools and market intelligence into the Eze EMS while remaining accessible from the same screen—Neuman says that the finished product feels like “one application” rather than separate platforms bolted together. This has allowed Eze EMS to boost its transaction-cost analysis capabilities ahead of incoming European regulations, such as the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid II), which will introduce stringent new requirements around best execution and trade analysis. 

“There’s a big opportunity to go beyond a check-box exercise for transaction-cost analysis (TCA), and to really start to use analytics to improve execution quality,” says Neuman. “That really is important, especially when we start to think about best execution and those requirements under Mifid II.”