Waters Rankings 2025: Best execution management system (EMS) provider—SS&C Advent

Overview

Firms trading across asset classes are increasingly seeking high-performance execution capabilities. This is particularly true in markets like fixed income, where electronification continues to mature, and within alternative investments, where sophisticated execution offers firms the potential for carving out a competitive advantage. More than ever, traders recognize that optimizing execution, managing complex orders and leveraging real-time market insights across diverse asset classes demand a powerful EMS. RealTick is designed specifically to cater to these evolving needs.

We are excited that RealTick is being recognized in this year’s Waters Rankings as the best EMS on the market. Over the past few years, we’ve dedicated significant investment and development efforts to address new challenges for buy-side firms, including increasing demands for high-performance execution capabilities across diverse asset classes. As industry leaders, we pride ourselves on our ability to continuously innovate and work alongside our clients, providing purpose-built, scalable solutions tailored to the dynamic needs of the global marketplace

Karen Geiger, SVP and co-general manager, SS&C Advent

The solution

RealTick has been developed and iterated upon for over four decades, working in collaboration with traders to understand what they need to optimize execution, manage complex orders and leverage real-time market insights. RealTick, a global, broker-agnostic execution management system, offers centralized access to aggregated liquidity and tools for managing positions, portfolios and trading risk across global equities and their derivatives, fixed income, and digital assets. RealTick provides market intelligence and real-time trading analytics to help drive performance.

Differentiators

• Multi-asset—supports trading across equities, bonds, crypto, futures and options.
• Automated trading—automates low-touch flow and focuses on complex trades.
• Best execution—features an integrated algo-wheel reducing broker bias and enhancing best execution.
• Centralized liquidity—supports the ability to source multi-asset liquidity in one place.
• Synchronized OEMS—combines RealTick with compliance, modeling, analytics and allocations.
• Open architecture—leverages Eze Marketplace to connect with a growing list of trading tools.

Recent goals

Over the past year, SS&C Advent has expanded into fixed-income trading, enhanced the scalability and resilience of the trading system and improved automated trading with more flexible order routing. It launched and improved its OEMS integration with a new position-based ticket and integrated with Eze Marketplace to drive interoperability with third-party vendors.

Product roadmap

SS&C Advent is currently refreshing the EMS interface, improving multi-asset support by expanding into FX, enabling mobile EMS access, and adding an audit trail for automated trading. It will deepen marketplace integration with pre-trade transaction-cost analysis, introduce MS Teams integration, and continue strengthening system performance and reliability.