Buy-Side Technology Awards 2014: Winners' Circle—Bloomberg

What, in your opinion, separates the Bloomberg AIM OMS from other solutions in the marketplace?
Dan Matthies, Bloomberg: Investment management firms struggle with the data requirements of many vendor-based OMSs, spending large amounts of time configuring, testing and continually validating data-enrichment routines. Bloomberg AIM comes pre-configured with Bloomberg Security Master, corporate actions, market pricing, streaming data, news, and analytics. As a result, firms can significantly reduce the resources needed for ongoing maintenance, support and integration efforts, and minimize operational risk of the system. In addition, Bloomberg AIM customers can integrate data from other providers, as desired. Bloomberg AIM has emerged as a leading multi-asset order and execution management solution for a diverse audience of nearly 700 buy-side firms in 87 different countries around the world. The judges have recognized Bloomberg AIM for its unique set of capabilities that today support the workflow of more than 12,000 users across the front, middle and back office at buy-side investment and corporate institutions.

What recent enhancements has Bloomberg made to the platform?
Matthies: Over the last year, we have focused on enhancing our infrastructures with next-generation services to increase in-memory capacity and speed, and manage higher volumes. We have enhanced support for more derivative products and derivative regulatory requirements. Bloomberg AIM was the first OMS to provide integration with our swap execution facility, as well as European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) reporting, and we’re providing solutions for our European clients for the recent T+2 regulations. We have fully-integrated analytics and risk with Bloomberg’s risk product offerings, as well as enhanced position-keeping functionality. Our integrated operation suite for post-trade processing and affirmation also includes support for multi-leg assets, spread trading, pair trading, and derivatives trading.

Where are you seeing the most of your growth right now—either by region or by client type?
Matthies: We’re seeing increased demand from and have had success in Australia, Japan and Brazil. There is also internal growth from clients, increasing their usage by bringing additional desks on to AIM, and we still have a strong demand from hedge fund managers.

When you’re talking about an integrated, front-office platform, what are the key capabilities that clients are looking for? Has client demand changed at all recently?
Matthies: Bloomberg AIM leverages the core news, data and analytics from the Bloomberg Professional service. Bloomberg Derivatives delivers the most transparent view into the data required, along with the tools for putting it to work. It covers foreign exchange, interest-rate, inflation, credit, equity and commodity derivatives, plus convertibles and structured notes. Our suite of market-standard models and risk management analytics delivers advantages across the board. Client demands that have driven this include the electronic trading and reporting of derivatives, driven by regulatory pressure, an increased request for liquidity aggregation across asset classes, and the start of a movement from accounting book of record, to investment book of record systems by buy-side firms.

Client demands that have driven this include the electronic trading and reporting of derivatives, driven by regulatory pressure, an increased request for liquidity aggregation across asset classes, and the start of a movement from accounting book of record, to investment book of record systems by buy-side firms.