BST Awards 2019: Best Buy-Side EMS—SS&C Eze

Buy-side firms are being squeezed by cost pressures and lower margins, which have led to trading desks shrinking. In light of this, traders are expected to do more with fewer resources, resulting in desks looking to augment their human capital with automated trading processes. 

This is an area of focus for SS&C Eze and its Eze EMS platform, which wins the best buy-side EMS category in this year’s BST Awards in London. 

Andrew Pheifer, director, product management at SS&C Eze, says clients are looking to set up rules-based frameworks that automate “easy-to-work” orders so that traders can focus on more complex trades. “Each firm wants something slightly different, but the ultimate goal is the same: to free up traders to concentrate exclusively on the highest value-producing activities,” he says. To that end, Eze EMS will feature improved rules-based order routing functionality during 2020. 

In the last 12 months, the firm has enhanced Eze EMS’ trade execution capabilities with the introduction of Algo Wheel. Orders from Eze OMS are automatically staged to Eze EMS and can be routed to market via the wheel, which rotates among broker algos based on pre-set parameters. Algo Wheel works on single- and multi-leg orders such as equity pairs, allowing traders to focus on strategies that will achieve best execution, while the wheel determines who to trade with. There is no need for recertification with brokers, and the wheel can be configured within minutes. “With the Algo Wheel, less distraction about who to trade with means traders can be more focused on what really drives performance: the choice of execution strategy to implement,” Pheifer says.

According to Pheifer, more than a decade has gone by with little to no innovation in pairs trading algos, although he adds that there has been a resurgence in new or improved multi-leg order execution strategies. Since the start of the year, Eze EMS has rolled out more than a dozen multi-leg broker algo updates.