BUY-SIDE TECHNOLOGY AWARDS: Best integrated front-office platform: Bloomberg

Certain quarters of buy side would argue that the investment management industry is still a long way off from seeing a single, fully integrated ‘all singing all dancing’ front-office platform, although Bloomberg, with its staggeringly large buy-side community of some 200,000 users, would beg to differ.

Bloomberg’s front-office initiative rests squarely on its ubiquitous Bloomberg Professional service, a front-office platform so widely used across the industry that the brand name has evolved into a generic term encompassing all front-office platforms, much in the same way that Hoover and iPod do in the vacuum cleaner and MP3 player industries, respectively.

Integrated with Bloomberg Professional is a suite of trading capabilities for the front office, including: Bloomberg EMS, a broker-neutral trading tool with real-time analysis for working equities, futures and options orders; Bloomberg FX Dealing, offering over 1,500 price-takers performing multi-bank RFQs (request for quotes) and/or using streaming executable FX rates combined in a commingled trade blotter; and Bloomberg Tradebook, a global agency broker that provides direct market access with a trading analytics and algorithms to institutional traders active in over 60 global markets. And finally there is Bloomberg AIM (Asset and Investment Manager), a front- and middle-office application used by institutional asset managers, insurance companies, pension funds, hedge fund managers, and proprietary trading desks, that provides strategy management, compliance, financing, trade settlement, portfolio analysis, order management and electronic trading, all within an open architecture.

In short, Bloomberg has all the front-office bases covered, and if there is an all singing all dancing front-office platform on the market, its name is Bloomberg Professional. —VBA

JUDGE'S COMMENT
Simply the easiest to implement and integrate, with extensive data and functionality—if anything, Bloomberg is pulling away from the competition.

BLOOMBERG REACTION
“We are excited that Bloomberg has been recognized by the Buy-Side Technology Awards as the best integrated front-office platform for 2010. For more than 20 years, Bloomberg has partnered with buy-side firms of all sizes and types to provide innovative solutions for their broad range of needs, from data and analytics, to trade execution and risk management. Buy-side players around the world rely on our unmatched information news and proprietary tools to stay ahead of critical market challenges.”
—Domenic Maida, global head of core terminal, Bloomberg