It seems barely possible, but it was a decade ago that Waters launched its inaugural Waters Rankings, a program that has, over the years, grown in terms of its reader support and the number of categories on offer. And while the financial technology industry back in 2002 wasn’t that of the cottage variety, it’s fair to say that the number of applications and services available to buy-side and sell-side institutions—and perhaps, more pertinently, their sophistication—has grown appreciably. But so too have the technology and operational challenges facing market participants, rendering the current operating environment, regardless of firms’ locations, more vexing than at any time in the past.

This challenge is likely to intensify next year, once the US presidential elections are done and dusted, and the US regulators get their hooks into an industry that many feel has been leading a charmed existence for too long.   

As usual, the Waters Rankings has polled the magazine’s entire readership—some 10,000 financial services professionals—across a range of categories, with the view to establishing the industry’s leading services and technology providers. Readers were not asked to vote on specific products or services, but rather on the organization behind them. Hence, the write-ups cover a range of technologies and services on offer from the category winners, accompanied, in many instances, by recent company news and plans still in the pipeline.

WINNERS' CIRCLE

Best Full-Service Brokerage: Morgan Stanley
Best Agency Brokerage: ConvergEx Group
Best Interdealer Brokerage: Icap
Best Crossing Network Provider: Liquidnet
Best Sell-Side Clearing Provider: JPMorgan
Best Exceptions and Reconciliation Management Provider: Omgeo
Best Sell-Side OMS: Bloomberg TOMS
Best Buy-Side OMS: ConvergEx’s Eze OMS
Best Portfolio Management System: Advent Software
Best EMS: Instinet
Best EDM Solution: Sybase, an SAP company
Best Reference Data Provider: Thomson Reuters
Best Corporate Actions Solution: Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.
Best Low-Latency Data Provider: Thomson Reuters
Best CEP Solution Provider: Sybase, an SAP company
Best AML Compliance Solution: Fiserv
Best Counterparty Risk Solution: SunGard
Best Market Risk Solution: FinAnalytica
Best Credit Risk Solution: Numerix
Best Risk Analytics Provider: Numerix
Best Trading Floor Communication System Provider: IPC Systems
Best Datacenter Provider: BT
Best Network Provider: BT
Best Data Grid Provider: IBM
Best Server Virtualization Provider: VMware
Best Outsourcing Provider: IBM