Asia Awards 2024: Best order management system (OMS) provider—Bloomberg

Overview

Asset managers are inundated with vast volumes of information, including research, news and market-related data in addition to having to manage demands around fee compression, market consolidation, investment transparency, and increasingly complex regulations. Aggregating, analyzing and acting on this information in an efficient manner is a challenge for the buy side. More than 900 firms globally rely on Bloomberg’s order and investment management platform, Bloomberg Asset and Investment Manager (AIM), to manage large parts of their front and middle offices.

The solution  

Fully integrated with the Bloomberg Terminal, Bloomberg AIM offers multi-asset solutions for decision support and portfolio management, order management, trade compliance, and post-trade workflows. It forms part of Bloomberg’s Buy-Side Solutions, a suite of products and services supporting the entire investment lifecycle. Asset managers use AIM to streamline, develop and test their strategies across a range of asset classes, while real-time data and analytics allow these ideas to be implemented and adjusted as markets move.

Secret sauce  

Bloomberg AIM integrates client position and transaction information within the Bloomberg Terminal and into Bloomberg’s suite of pre-and post-trade analytics tools, including research management, risk, performance and attribution, transaction-cost analysis and the firm’s regulatory reporting hub. It combines all workflows into a centralized system, reducing the number of applications that need to be integrated, all with consistent data and a user and system support structure providing visibility across the entire enterprise workflow.

Recent milestones

• Enhanced Portfolio Manager Workspace (PM <GO>), integrating with data and analytics. Upgraded multi-portfolio capabilities, deeper ties to performance/risk analytics and liquidity insights, embedding automation for an enriched portfolio manager experience
• Expansion of derivative asset classes, enhanced scale in order management, automated middle-office processes through centralized trade management, and simplification and standardization of derivatives lifecycle actions
• Bolstered compliance functionality with real-time insights embedded into PM decision-support tool and portfolio optimizer, ensuring greater transparency on compliance for proposed trades

Future objectives

Bloomberg will:

• Cater for additional multi-asset workflows, complex derivatives, and larger portfolios, focusing on scalability and greater throughput
• Streamline middle-office processes and investment data quality through closer alignment with asset servicers and accounting
• Foster greater consistency, integration, and open access by expanding its API framework
• Enrich the portfolio manager experience with additional analytics and enhanced order modeling and automation
• Embed position maintenance and asset lifecycle workflows

Why they won

Bloomberg follows up its win in the best market data provider category in last year’s WatersTechnology Asia Awards by winning the best OMS provider category this year, arguably the most important category of all from a buy-side perspective. Not only does the New York-headquartered data and technology giant provide its extensive buy- and sell-side clientele with a vast range of integrated applications and ancillary technologies that underpin virtually all front- and middle-office functions across both sides of the industry, but it also offers high-quality market, reference and specialist data feeding those functions. If ever there was a vendor that could legitimately claim to be the all-singing, all-dancing front- and middle-office technology and data provider, Bloomberg would be it, while the core of its buy-side proposition would center on its outstanding Bloomberg AIM platform.