Buy-Side Technology Awards 2017: Best Integrated Front-Office Platform—Eze Software
Eze Software reclaims the best integrated front-office platform award, having last won the accolade in 2015.
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Integration has been the name of the game for front-office systems for some time, the assumed Holy Grail of which has been the OEMS (order and execution management system) that promises the world to traders but has mostly failed to fully deliver. Eze Software, winner of the best integrated front-office platform at this year’s BST Awards, has instead chosen to integrate its EMS, OMS, compliance, and portfolio and investor accounting functions into one workflow within its Investment Suite, without jamming all of these systems into a disjointed whole.
Over the course of the last year, Eze has specifically worked to integrate its existing systems into a sum greater than its parts, with the end goal of providing asset managers with a single toolset to extract alpha from investment processes, whether that is through the adoption of the complete Investment Suite or implementing its discrete components. For example, Eze has added support for integrated compliance, position-checking and functionality for its most popular pairs and spreads workflows within its EMS, aimed at minimizing the need for traders to jump between multiple systems as part of pre-trade compliance processes. The vendor’s efforts have clearly borne significant fruit, attracting 258 new buy-side users since June 2016 to boost the total number of users on the Investment Suite among the asset management community to just over 2,000.
Partnerships have also played a major part in Eze’s integration efforts over the past year, particularly in the analytics space. In March, it announced that it had linked up with OTAS Technologies, since acquired by Liquidnet, to implement the vendor’s real-time data analytics and market intelligence into the execution workflows of the Eze EMS. With Mifid II on the horizon, the vendor then turned its attention to best execution by forging a partnership with Trade Informatics to integrate the latter’s analytics, which provide a view of transaction-cost analysis, a timely issue for the buy side in the run up to the new Directive being implemented. Eze is by no means finished with its integration work, however.
Over the course of 2018, it intends to further extend the Investment Suite through expansion of its trading and compliance capacity for large numbers of holdings and portfolios, enhancing the ease-of-use of its multi-leg trading workflows and multi-day order management, and increasing the speed for onboarding new clients that have significant historical performance data. It is also planning to further build out its Mifid II-related functionality through automation and trading intelligence enhancements.
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