Waters Rankings 2025: Best buy-side order management system (OMS) provider—Bloomberg

Overview

Bloomberg AIM is an integrated front-to-back order management system (OMS) delivering solutions supporting portfolio management, trading, compliance, and post-trade middle-office operations. Bloomberg AIM offers a modular architecture, allowing customers to use individual components as stand-alone modules, such as investment decision support, order and execution management, and post-trade operations. It is part of Bloomberg’s integrated solutions for the buy side, designed to deliver front-to-back technology for the full investment lifecycle.

The solution  

Bloomberg AIM provides buy-side firms with a platform on which to manage their various investment process.

• For portfolio managers, it provides an investment book of record (IBOR), intraday position views, risk/P&L, what-if analysis, and order rebalancing capabilities.
• For traders, it provides an integrated order and execution management system (OEMS) with connectivity to over 30 venues and the ability to access liquidity in more than 100 countries and currencies.
• For operations, it provides connectivity to downstream systems in firms’ technology stacks and matching and settlement applications like the Depository Trust and Clearing Corp. (DTCC) Institutional Trade Processing platform and Swift.
• For compliance personnel, it supports the ability to code rules that monitor and enforce investment, regulatory and internal compliance constraints throughout the investment process.

Differentiators  

• Integrated real-time portfolio analytics
• Broad asset class coverage
• Integration with the Bloomberg Terminal data (embedded security master) and analytics
• Multi-asset trade automation and process automation capabilities
• High-touch customer support
• Hosted platform obviating the need for updates/reimplementation when new features are available

Recent goals

Bloomberg:

• Launched Portfolio Manager Workspace (PM<GO>), combining ideation of portfolio and model construction with implementation of change on client portfolios. It is a single place for portfolio managers to inspect, validate, manage and effect changes within their client portfolios.
• Streamlined middle and back office: Bloomberg AIM now features expanded and deeper integration with asset servicers like custodians, fund administrators and middle-office outsourcing firms in an effort to eliminate the swivel-chair phenomenon.
• Invested in enhancing its trade automation capabilities, including allocation automation and support for T+1 compliance

Product roadmap

Bloomberg will focus on:

• Expanding its asset class coverage and analytics, catering for more multi-asset workflows and complex derivatives
• Improving its product connectivity through enhanced interoperability and delivering an extensive API library
• Streamlining and automating complex workflows by integrating analytics across the investment workflow with embedded automation to unlock insights and enable exceptions-based decision-making
• Investing in scale, reliability and customization and expanding order, trade and allocation processing and performance, while also providing data transparency across the platform