Sell-Side Technology Awards 2023: Best sell-side front-office platform—Bloomberg

Overview

Bloomberg provides an integrated suite of data, sales, communications, trading, risk and analytics applications that connects sell-side users with global markets. It combines the firm’s sell-side order management system (TOMS) and front-office risk system (MARS), providing integrated position, order, execution and risk management support across multiple asset classes and venues. Integration between OMS and risk systems provides a single source of data and analytics, ensuring consistency and ease of integration.

The solution

Sell-side traders and sales need real-time access to accurate trading and risk data, and portfolio representations. The integrated TOMS and MARS solution enables them to assess the real impact of a trade on the risk profile of the bank’s books or the client’s portfolios, running the same calculations used by the risk management team. This allows banks to make better informed decisions more systematically, reduce risks and improve execution for clients.

Secret sauce

Bloomberg’s sell-side solutions are integrated with all the data and analytics on the Bloomberg Terminal, providing users with the ability to access and tailor plug-and-play components that interact with other Bloomberg applications across the entire trading workflow. The solutions also offer coverage across all asset classes from simple vanilla products to most complex structured products and mortgages.

Recent enhancements

• A derivatives pricing service that allows pricing of derivatives every 10 seconds
• Expended credit trading capabilities with the launch of all-to-all trading with Bloomberg Bridge, which provides access to a network of 3,700 market participants
• Expanded asset coverage to include analytics like bucketed term structure interest rate risk for fixed-income-based ETFs and mortgages. The analytics are calculated based on market standard ACF methodology and covers a wide range of ETFs.

Future objectives

• Continued investment in APIs across all front-office workflows, including a pricing API for RFQs, a market data API, integration with Bloomberg Query Language for risk and trade analytics
• Continued investments in trade automation and infrastructure enhancements to enable lower latency workflows and analytics expansion
• Support for fixed-income ETF look-through risk analytics and pricing on underlying constituents
• Expand P&L and explain capabilities to first-generation exotic rates products
• Support Term SOFR and RFR CMS across all products, including exotics
• Expansion of analytics on mortgage-backed securities, including advanced analytics like FRTB and upgrading to the latest version of BAM models

Why they won

Bloomberg wins its second individual category of this year’s SST Awards after emerging top in the best sell-side analytics product category. It tasted success in this category back in 2020, thanks to its ever-popular TOMS offering, which, when combined with its MARS risk system, makes for a compelling, all-singing, all-dancing sell-side front-office platform. A quick glance down its to-do list illustrates just how much the New York data and tech specialist is looking to the future with new support and functionality on the workbench. Only a fool would bet against Bloomberg winning this category again next year.