Waters Rankings 2015: Best Sell-Side OMS Provider ─ Fidessa

Fidessa's OMS allows clients to manage orders from receipt to confirmation as it automates the complete trade lifecycle workflow. Jay Biancamano, head of equities product marketing for the Americas at Fidessa, says the firm has made major investments in adding content and intelligence to its offering.

"We know that brokers have to differentiate themselves from other brokers. So there's a demand for content; there's a demand for better analytics; and there's definitely a demand for giving them unique data and incorporating proprietary data and datasets into their workflow," Biancamano says.

For cash equities, Fidessa enhanced its market open execution service so that users can now automatically calculate an instrument's level of "qualified merchandise," he says. It also improved its basket trading functionality by offering the ability to configure a client's systems to use the instrument's primary market data to populate benchmarks. Clients can also now allow basket traders to configure wave quantities based on percentage of average-daily volume, opening volume and closing volume.

Biancamano says that the platform's smart-order router's posting logic allows users to intelligently send orders to venues based on the latest published exchange rebate schedules. And as analytics tools take on greater importance, Fidessa enhanced its real-time intelligence platform by creating a central analytics server that utilizes a high-performance tick database allowing for more flexible research offerings away from the OMS.

In the equity-options space, Fidessa released the complex order entry dialog that now contains a panel that enables users to enter child-order split parameters at the time of order entry, configurable single-click order entry, the ability to facilitate quick routing, the ability to enter both single and complex orders, and the addition of alternate pricing fields to the complex dialog for certain strategies.

The company has also enhanced its futures and options capabilities in the face of new regulations, and expanded its platform to offer a fully integrated US treasury trading solution.

Rest assured that Bloomberg will be back next year seeking to reverse this result, but Fidessa should be proud of this coup and will no doubt look to entrench its position as the premier sell-side OMS provider next year.