Sell-Side Technology Awards 2020: Best Sell-Side Front-Office Platform—Bloomberg

Bloomberg has again come out on top in the category of best sell-side front-office platform in this year’s Sell-Side Technology Awards. The data giant takes home the title for the fourth time, having also won last year, in 2014 and in 2013, the first year the awards were held.

Bloomberg’s products that stand out in this area are part of a fully integrated suite that includes its position management system, Trade Order Management Solutions (TOMS); its risk management system, Multi-Asset Risk System (MARS); its execution management system, ETOMS; and DASH, a salesperson efficiency system, which is built on an algorithm that lets salespeople know which clients to call and when.

Phil McCabe, global head of sell-side product at Bloomberg, says though the ongoing coronavirus pandemic is near the top of most businesses’ worries, it’s only another layer on top of what has been a strenuous 12 years of adjusting to new regulations since the 2008 financial crisis. Over that time, the push to show transparency and better risk management are themes that have dogged financial firms—prompting pivots to electronic trading, while meeting new, costly capital requirements.

“Our customers are looking for ways to switch more of their high-touch business, which largely takes place over the phone, to low-touch business, where clients can view quotes on a screen and quickly execute a transaction that is automatically processed through their systems,” McCabe says. “These are the types of processes we’ve been working to improve, and this is where we’ve invested to help them.”

The suite today boasts more than 530 live sites—up from about 450 last year—and more than 16,300 users. Bloomberg recently updated its cross-asset pricing and risk system by adding programmatic APIs, and McCabe adds that soon it will roll out natural language processing-powered capabilities that will reduce the number of clicks it takes to access trade histories with various buy-side partners.