BST Awards 2021: Best buy-side EMS—FactSet    

OVERVIEW

Portware EMS is a multi-asset class execution management system (EMS).

Typical user-firms: More than 155,000 investment professionals at investment managers, hedge funds, asset owners, private equity firms and insurance providers. 

As of Q3 Fiscal 2021 (May 31, 2021), client count was 6,172, a net increase of 69 in the past three months.

User count increased by 1,649 to 155,004 in the past three months.

Annual subscription value was 95%.

Employee count was 10,713, up 6.4% over the last twelve months.

WHAT’S NEW

FactSet released a number of new capabilities within Portware EMS across a variety of asset classes. Program trade automation has been added to support desk efficiency and decision-making consistency, while in FX, Smart RFQ and Smart Streaming create curated liquidity pools specific to the attributes of the order on the blotter. Also new is support for cash settled forwards (CSFs) and cleared FX derivatives workflows. In fixed income, the firm’s new multi-source adaptor allows clients to aggregate data and analytics from various providers, while additional liquidity has been added through integration with Trumid. Hedge fund compliance enhancements have been released to support funds’ order marking needs, while the integration of Truvalue Lab’s ESG intelligence allows users to monitor a portfolio’s ESG positioning and exposure. They can also evaluate sustainability-related risk factors and real-world actions and impacts for quantitative analysis and back-testing. The firm’s APIs have been developed to facilitate connectivity with business intelligence tools, allowing clients to view and distribute data in PowerBI and Tableau.

WHAT’S TO COME 

FactSet will continue to focus on and enhance Portware EMS with further investment in cloud-centric access points, including the migration of the platform to the AWS cloud. It will focus on private markets, deep sector metrics and ESG intelligence content, in addition to expanding its API offering to support clients’ programmatic needs.

WHY THEY WON

FactSet’s Portware EMS topped this category thanks to its vendor-neutral and open architecture, enabling clients to integrate proprietary and third-party market data, benchmarks and analytics within Portware’s buy-side trading blotters. The EMS acts as the central platform for creating and executing trading strategies for global equities, futures, options, fixed income and FX. FactSet is also set to migrate Portware EMS to the AWS cloud.