Buy-Side Technology Awards 2014: Best Integrated Front-Office Platform—Bloomberg

This category is about integration and it’s hard to ignore what Bloomberg AIM brings to the table: Users can consolidate market data sources and providers, as well as order management, trading and settlement systems into a single, global, multi-currency solution.

Buy-side traders continue to struggle with current data volumes, and they need to balance this thirst for information with new ways to achieve alpha, reduce portfolio costs, manage risk and compliance, and attain best execution, according to Dan Matthies, global head of Bloomberg AIM, who spoke to Waters in June. But more than being solely a front-end product, AIM is designed to deliver global, multi-asset solutions for front-end portfolio management and trading, although it also incorporates middle- and back-office operations.

AIM offers decision support for portfolio management; pre-trade, post-trade and end-of-day compliance; order management, electronic trading and execution; post-trade matching, settlement, reconciliation and performance measurement; and data aggregation and reporting. With over 12,000 buy-side users, major draw-cards for the vendor are its news feeds and terminals. Leveraging Bloomberg Professional, AIM provides coverage for equities, currencies, commodities, money markets, government bonds, mortgages, and cash and derivatives markets, while AIM Analytics pulls this information together and serves as a tool that utilizes multiple systems to understand portfolio structure, position analysis, active exposure, and forward-looking risk.

Bloomberg News publishes 6,000 stories a day from almost 150 bureaus around the world. According to the news behemoth, Bloomberg has tracked 250,000 events and transcribed over 50,000 conferences through this year alone. AIM connects to a swath of trading and execution management tools, including Bloomberg EMS, which incorporates indication of interest (IoI) and trade advertisements, and a transaction-cost analysis (TCA) tool. Furthermore, the vendor offers liquidity in global fixed-income asset classes to over 15,000 traders, while Bloomberg Tradebook serves as its agency broker, managing trading strategies to over 100 global exchanges.

There is no guarantee that Bloomberg will emerge on top in this category again next year, but it is a safe bet that AIM will be right there in the mix.

This category is all about integration and it’s hard to ignore what Bloomberg AIM brings to the table: Users can consolidate market data sources and providers, as well as order management, trading and settlement systems into a single, global, multi-currency solution.