WatersTechnology Asia Awards 2020: Best Order Management System—SS&C Eze

SS&C Eze was the big winner at the inaugural WatersTechnology Asia Awards, walking away with three wins, including the two key buy-side-focused front-office categories: best order management system (OMS) and best execution management system (EMS). However, this win is no flash in the pan for the Boston-based front-office specialist: It won this category and the best buy-side EMS in last year’s Buy-Side Technology Awards, while in this year’s Waters Rankings, it emerged top in the best OMS and portfolio management system categories, underscoring its consistency and broad appeal across the markets it serves.    

The Eze OMS acts as a centralized hub for investment operations, streamlining investment cycles for all asset classes, from idea generation through to settlement. As a crucial component of the Eze Investment Suite, everyone from traders and portfolio managers to compliance officers and operations staff use it as a collaboration tool to ensure that all functions related to the trade lifecycle run smoothly, and crucially, transparently. 

According to Edward Bee, managing director for Asia-Pacific at SS&C Eze, the Eze OMS is easy to use and highly configurable: “We provide an intuitive user experience and user-centered design for easy-to-adopt workflows,” he says. “We offer configurability on the front-end so that clients don’t need [to do] custom coding. This also allows users to configure views and to slice and dice data exactly how they want to view it or format it in an infinite number of ways.” 

Compliance is a key component of the Eze OMS platform. Pre-, intra-, and post-trade checks are integrated into portfolio modeling and trading workflows, and can be run at any point during the lifecycle of a trade to ensure that clients’ strategies and portfolios comply with investors’ mandates and regulatory obligations. 

Bee explains that the current Covid-19 crisis has amplified some clients’ existing challenges, including due diligence requirements and ongoing fee pressures, the latter of which is a common theme across all buy-side markets. “At the end of the day, and regardless of market conditions, our clients want to focus on running their investment strategies, not their technology and processes. So we keep that in mind with everything we do—we try to help them reduce noise, limit distractions, and do more with less.” 

As firms look to scale and create broader efficiencies, operational alpha is a key consideration for them. With a focus on keeping clients connected, SS&C Eze is now working on expanding its existing mobile capabilities, ensuring that its clients have access to all the investment data they need at any given time, whether they’re working from home or in the office.