Sell-Side Technology Awards 2024: Best sell-side front-office platform—Bloomberg

Overview

Bloomberg offers the sell side an integrated suite of data, sales, communications, trading, risk, and analytics solutions that connect users with global markets and streamlines their workflows. It combines Bloomberg’s sell-side order management system (TOMS), front-office risk system (MARS), and enterprise trade order management system (ETOMS) to provide integrated position, order, execution and risk management across multiple asset classes and venues. This integration provides users with a single source of data and analytics, ensuring firm-wide consistency and ease of execution across liquidity pools.

The solution  

To be competitive, sell-side traders and salespeople need real-time access to accurate trading and risk data, and portfolio representations. The integrated TOMS and MARS offering allows immediate assessment of real trade impact on banks’ risk profiles and clients’ 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 trading workflow. The solutions cover all asset classes from vanilla products to structured products and mortgages.

Recent milestones

• ETOMS cross-venue order router (XOR) allows users to route orders across multiple venues and counterparties, optimizing execution strategies, using advanced algorithms and real-time market data analysis to minimize execution costs, reduce market impact, and improve overall trading performance.
• ETOMS custom formulas engine (CFE) allows traders to construct formulas that drive market-making and execution processes through market data, portfolio metrics, and risk indicators. The flexibility of this engine enables users to tailor their formulas to suit the intricacies of different asset classes and trading instruments, enhancing effectiveness and efficiency.

Future objectives

• Continued investment in APIs across all front-office workflows, including a pricing API for requests for quotes (RFQs), a market data API, and integration with Bloomberg Query Language (BQL) for risk and trade analytics
• Continued investments in trade automation and infrastructure enhancements to enable lower latency workflows and analytics expansion
• Visual dynamic reporting tool that can be tailored to traders’ specific needs
• Asset class expansion into structured notes workflow and advanced bucketed risk
• ETOMS electronic-hedging tool designed to streamline and automate the hedging process, allowing users to identify and execute hedging trades to mitigate risk exposure associated with their primary positions. The tool uses real-time market data and analytics to calculate optimal hedge ratios, select appropriate hedging instruments, and can automate the process based on a trader-controlled rules engine.

Why they won

Bloomberg is no stranger to the winners’ circle of this category―this is its fifth win in as many years in what is unquestionably one of the most competitive categories on offer in these awards, thanks to its phenomenally successful Bloomberg TOMS offering. Key to Bloomberg’s success across the sell-side front office is largely down to its integration with other best-of -breed front-office applications, effectively creating an entire trading-focused ecosystem, and the fact that the New York content and data giant never sits still―a quick glance at the platform’s recent enhancements and its near-term objectives illustrates just how important innovation and staying one step ahead of the market are to the firm.