Sell-Side Technology Awards 2025: Best sell-side middle-office platform—Gresham

Overview

Prime EDM is a middle-office data management solution for market risk, pricing and reference data. With cloud-based deployment and a focus on delivering value to clients through a deployed or managed service delivery model, Prime EDM serves a global client base covering sell-side, buy-side and market infrastructure firms, including exchanges and central banks. Focused on business user self-service and maximizing market data ROI, Gresham supports users with 24/7 operations support.

The solution  

Prime EDM is used to underpin independent price verifications, a key middle-office function where firms compare their traders’/front-office prices to market consensus prices. Enabling clients to achieve regulatory compliance by ensuring consistent use of data across their organization for a variety of processes, Prime EDM facilitates faster creation of analytics and proprietary insight from data.

Secret sauce  

The Prime EDM platform facilitates fast, cloud-neutral deployment and a significant reduction in costs for users as it minimizes the need for extra hardware, internal database maintenance and database licensing fees. The platform scales linearly and offers resilience through continuous availability. It is likely to be used by banks to meet FRTB market data requirements when the regulation comes into force in 2026 in the EU and 2027 in the UK. FRTB compliance is expected to cost an estimated $100 million to over $200 million for large banks.

Recent milestones

• Prime EDM continues to extend its cloud offering. Services are now available for connecting to feeds like ICE and LSEG Enterprise Message API (EMA) for processing real-time updates. Connectivity to downstream systems has also been extended by offering the ability to stream out datasets—for example, through Apache Kafka.
• To give data operators more insight into data quality, reporting capabilities have been extended. Reports are now available that provide insight into data quality and data sources, while metrics are provided to give insight into data distribution to help control cost.

Future objectives

Gresham plans to:

• Derive consolidated prices and curves in real time as source data comes in. Data can be derived flexibly through different programming languages like Python and Java.
• Extend the out-of-the-box offering for portfolios and transactional data
• Apply AI to more easily onboard and validate new data sources

Why they won

Gresham follows up its win in this year’s Inside Market Data and Inside Reference Data Awards where it won the best cloud-based data provider category by winning the best sell-side middle-office platform in these awards. This might not sound especially noteworthy, given that a number of technology firms won categories in both awards this year and in years past. 

What is noteworthy, however, is that Gresham’s two wins were delivered by the same product―Prime EDM―which, if one considers how different the categories are, underlines the platform’s impressive versatility. Prime EDM is a cloud-based, middle-office data management platform designed to help firms manage their market risk, pricing and reference data by centralizing that data from various sources, ensuring it scrubbed and normalized for use by downstream applications. 

At face value, enterprise data management is not rocket science … until you try it. It is only then that the true scale and complexity of the undertaking can be fully appreciated. Gresham’s outstanding Prime EDM is still taking its baby steps, having only been launched in September 2022. However, functionality and the ability to satisfactorily address real-world challenges will always trump age and pedigree in this industry and what is clear from the firm’s two wins this year is that we’re likely to hear a lot more from Prime EDM in the coming months and years.