Waters Rankings 2017: Best Buy-Side Order Management System (OMS) Provider—Eze Software Group

“One of the big differentiators for Eze in general is not just our products but also how we provide services to our clients,” Neuman says. “For the OMS, there are a number of areas that we’re different from others, like our ability to manage allocations.”

The Eze OMS allows hedge funds with complex strategies, multiple analysts and varied portfolios to use a flexible system without needing to require each person to manually enter all the information they need for any given task. The company’s goal is to provide “operational alpha,” or a reduction of costs that smooths operational workflows, eliminates human error, streamlines compliance issues, and provides portfolio analytics that allow clients to focus on their core businesses.

“A big area of investment over the last year has been deeper and more seamless integration between the OMS, our portfolio accounting system, and the execution management system, to where there is little-to-no manual effort at all between trade activities,” Neuman says. “There is investment as well around exposing some of the compliance and positions in the execution management system within the OMS—so traders who are more comfortable executing trades in either system can get access to industry-leading compliance and allocations capabilities.”

One immediate benefit of greater integration between the systems is that clients can start to process trades earlier in the day, rather than waiting for drop copies of trades at the end of business. Over the next few months, Eze is focused on improving its performance and capacity so that it can serve not only growing funds, but also the needs of larger asset managers. Part of this includes better remote services so support personnel can monitor reliability.

Then, of course, Eze is also getting ready for the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid II) in January 2018. “We’re working on making sure we have everything in place to support Mifid II,” says Neuman. “We’re making sure we have out-of-the-box ways to store data, and establishing testing and integration with what is required for trade reporting.”