Waters Rankings 2019: Best Sell-Side OMS Provider: Bloomberg

For the fourth straight year it is Bloomberg—thanks to its ubiquitous TOMS platform—taking home the best sell-side order-management system (OMS) provider award.

Phil McCabe, head of the TOMS product for Bloomberg, points to continued regulatory pressures—and how the platform helps users to overcome those challenges—as the key reason for Bloomberg’s continued dominance in this category.

“The best way for firms to address these challenges is to reassess their technology stacks to simplify and streamline their workflows, making their business and compliance processes more efficient. Bloomberg TOMS enables hundreds of sell-side firms globally to create more efficient workflows, from pre-trade to post-trade, and to meet regulatory obligations such as Mifid II, the European Market Infrastructure Regulation, and the Fundamental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB),” he says. “Many of these regulations require breaking down silos, whether between front- and middle-office risk, or end-of-day and intraday risk data and modeling. For example, FRTB encourages alignment of front- and middle-office models and data for both its standardized and internal models approaches.”

To further improve its suite of solutions, the tech giant recently completed the integration of its Multi-Asset Risk Solution (MARS) with TOMS, which means that clients are now able to access both solutions via a single interface, McCabe says.

It has also expanded its offering to facilitate investing in China. “We began a phased inclusion of Chinese bonds into the Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate earlier this year, which was a big step toward opening up those markets,” he says. “To support our clients in this development, we built connectivity to Bond Connect and China’s Interbank Bond Market (CIBM), which allow global investors to trade in Chinese bonds with local counterparts. We’ve also developed functionality to help Chinese sell-side firms make markets via TOMS. This allows us to provide a very efficient and powerful technology solution for firms in China and firms investing in China.”