Buy-Side Technology Awards 2013: Winners' Circle—Eze Software Group

Winning both of these categories—for Eze OMS and RealTick—is quite an achievement. What do you think sets your offerings apart?
The creation of Eze Software Group brought together three industry-leading products—Eze OMS, RealTick EMS, and Tradar PMS—enabling us to offer what we call our “flexible-front-to-back” platform. We aren’t pitching a one-size-fits-all story—we are working with clients on solutions that best fit their individual needs. By virtue of having these products under one roof we can develop tighter, more intimate cross-product integrations and offer a more seamless and efficient workflow across the full investment lifecycle. However, each of our market-leading products remains flexible and open, and can interface and work with other in-house and third-party systems as well. Above all, we feel that what sets us apart is our commitment to being a partner and not just a vendor. Our product offerings are wrapped in a truly unique high-touch client-service model and our product roadmap is greatly influenced by our ongoing dialogue with clients.

RealTick is, of course, a multi-asset offering, but are you looking at new geographies to expand into for 2014?
We’re always exploring new opportunities across the globe for all Eze Software products. We continue to experience strong global growth as the market embraces our flexible front-to-back platform. We have an established presence in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia and continue to experience strong growth in these regions. For example, sales of the Tradar PMS in the US have tripled year-over-year since the launch of Eze Software Group. Latin America has been a new focus for us, and we’re seeing tremendous growth for all product lines as a direct result of product enhancements that we’ve developed in partnership with folks in that region. What has been particularly exciting about our 2013 growth is the number of clients that have expanded their relationship with us by adding a second, and sometimes even a third, product from Eze Software Group.

For the Eze OMS side, what are the areas that you’ll be focusing on when it comes to 2014?
One area of recent focus has been on developing more intimate integrations among the product lines. Earlier this year we released our first major integration enabling RealTick Data to power market data-dependent features of the OMS and PMS. The next cross-product enhancement we expect to release is the integration of Eze Compliance within RealTick EMS, extending the robust portfolio and trade compliance of Eze OMS to RealTick EMS, giving users the ability to combine oversight and controls with advanced execution and trade analytics. We also continue to execute on the individual product roadmaps. For example, compliance and data management are key drivers in the industry and we’ve continued to invest in the Eze Data Management offering, especially its Regulatory Filings toolkit, which automates the complex filing process for Form PF, CPO-PQR, and more. We plan to add support for the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD) filings in the coming months.

The long-term vision is to move the OMS and PMS into the cloud alongside the EMS. The goal is a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-deployed system that’s a fully modular, componentized front-to-back solution available as a self-hosted or fully hosted offering. Over the coming years, we’ll iteratively release new components in the cloud using a phased approach.

Typically, what are your clients looking for in terms of products, and how are you responding to that?
Clients are looking to consolidate systems and streamline workflows in an effort to achieve straight-through processing for the full investment cycle for all asset classes. Ultimately, this was the catalyst behind the creation of Eze Software and our “flexible-front-to-back” suite.

Our clients have also been looking for us to provide them with more options for mobility. Earlier this year, we launched RealTick UltraLite, extending critical functions of the RealTick EMS beyond the desktop to Apple and Android devices or a web browser. We also enhanced Eze Mobile, our native iPad OMS application, adding support for trade entry in addition to the existing profit-and-loss (P&L) and compliance support.