Waters Rankings 2021: Best sell-side order management system (OMS) provider—Bloomberg

WHY THEY WON

At its core, the Waters Rankings is a popularity contest and the winners are chosen simply by the number of votes you get. Considering that Bloomberg has won the best sell-side OMS category 11 of 12 years, it’s fair to say that TOMS is a very popular product on Wall Street, and there’s no reason to think Bloomberg’s run won’t continue. 

WHAT’S NEW

Bloomberg introduced analytics to support decision-making on the trading desk. The TOMS machine learning-driven order recommendation tool makes use of the firm’s own historical data.

The company added new navigation features via custom tiles that aggregate data and provide more intelligent filtering. 

Additional Libor transition and risk-free rate (RFR) solutions were introduced, notably to integrate RFRs into TOMS and electronic trading workflows, and structuring and risk management tools in MARS.  

Front-office risk functionality and analytics for RFR products, loans and structured notes were expanded. GUIs for Interest Rate Gamma curve risk and PNL Explain were enhanced for more transparency and drill-down capabilities.  

In response to market volatility amid the Covid-19 pandemic, measures to support for negative rates and commodity futures, and government responses (e.g., TALF) were introduced to help firms manage unprecedented high volumes of derivatives trades. 

WHAT’S TO COME 

For TOMS, the company will continue to expand functionalities for the asset classes covered by the solution, and introduce more tools, notably for foreign exchange, mortgages, repo and municipals. 

Bloomberg also says it will continue investing in developing TOMS to provide clients with next-generation tools, including pricing capabilities and data science-driven analytics.