Waters Rankings 2020: Best Sell-Side Order Management System Provider—Bloomberg

Five-and-a-half years ago, when Phil McCabe joined Bloomberg, he was pleasantly surprised by its “culture of continuous innovation—something that [founder] Mike Bloomberg built into the DNA of the company,” and its responsiveness to clients’ needs. In one previous role at a bank in London—McCabe spent 14 years in rates trading and structuring positions at banks before joining Bloomberg in 2014—he asked the firm’s IT department to make a change to a system and was told that it might get onto their to-do list in 18 months. The moral of the story: Real-time systems require real-time responsiveness.

Now, as Bloomberg’s global head of sell-side solutions, McCabe oversees the team that has won the best sell-side order management system (OMS) provider category in the Waters Rankings for the fifth year in a row—a feat he attributes to that culture of innovation and responsiveness. “We’re always looking to make sure that what we already have is working better, and to add new products and services,” he says.

Increasingly, the new products and services—or enhancements to existing ones—being developed are designed to help clients better understand customer activities and market forces. For example, one focus over the past few years has been to ensure that data is consistent across the vendor’s trading and risk products designed for use in the front and middle office, to ensure calculations run in both departments yield consistent results for activities such as Value-at-Risk calculations and capital allocation.

Another example is direct integration of its DASH salesperson analytics tool for equities and fixed-income liquidity discovery, and for making sure salespeople are aware of and can take advantage of any existing liquidity, into the trading system, enabling traders to respond to available liquidity instantaneously.

Now, McCabe is targeting a sixth win. And though unwilling to tempt fate by talking about new services still under wraps, he says there’s a lot of “exciting stuff” in the works, hinting at ever-tighter integration of risk management tools.