Buy-Side Technology Awards 2013: Best Integrated Front-Office Platform—Bloomberg

The importance of Bloomberg’s 15-year-old Asset and Investment Manager (AIM) hardly needs justification. Anyone who doesn’t understand the value of a single front-office interface for strategy management, compliance, financing, trade settlement, portfolio analysis, order management, and electronic trading either hasn’t been in the business long or won’t be for much longer. Over 11,000 buy-side practitioners at 650 asset managers, hedge funds, pension funds, and proprietary trading desks in 83 countries are users.

Olstein Capital Management, a Purchase, NY-based investment manager, has been a client for five years. “We chose Bloomberg AIM because it provides us with a complete front-to-back solution that addresses our needs from idea generation and trade order management to compliance, custodian reconciliation, attribution, and reporting,” says Michael Luper, executive vice president at Olstein. “The tight integration with Bloomberg’s fundamental data, news and research allows our entire team to operate on a common platform and easily share critical information. The fully hosted Bloomberg platform provides us with robust connectivity options regardless of employee location, and the support we receive from Bloomberg is responsive and intuitive.”

AIM support teams are in 10 worldwide locations and are available 24/7. They host regular user conferences to get feedback on new products and to share information.

Users have access to news from 33,000 sources, including Bloomberg News’ 6,000 daily stories; research and estimates from 1,500 sources; and events functionality that has tracked over 230,000 events and transcribed over 35,000 conference calls year to date.

AIM Analytics provides tools to understand portfolio structure, position analysis, active exposures, and forward-looking risk. It is integrated with an execution management system and its transaction-cost analytics. Bloomberg also offers liquidity in global fixed-income asset classes to over 15,000 traders. Bloomberg FX Dealing has over 1,500 price-takers performing multi-bank request-for-quotes and using streaming executable foreign-exchange rates combined in a commingled trade blotter. All of these solutions are provided at no additional cost.

Bloomberg Reaction:
“The Bloomberg AIM team is honored to receive the best integrated front-office platform award from Buy-Side Technology. We’ve built Bloomberg AIM to help buy-side investment firms meet the latest regulatory and industry mandates as well as support traders and portfolio managers so they can compete in an increasingly dynamic environment. This award demonstrates that Bloomberg remains dedicated to delivering a superior product to its buy-side customers.”
—Dan Matthies, global head of Bloomberg Asset and Investment Manager