Bloomberg AIM: Consistently unique in an ever‑changing market

Bloomberg won the Best order management system (OMS) provider category in the 2024 WatersTechnology Asia Awards thanks to Bloomberg AIM, its buy-side-focused OMS.

WatersTechnology speaks to Manju Sakhrani, head of buy-side product sales for North Asia at Bloomberg, about how the firm continues to differentiate Bloomberg AIM in a highly saturated buy-side market, and the challenges Asia-Pacific-based buy-side firms are facing.

Almost all capital markets firms have an OMS of some description, either developed in-house—a proprietary platform—or developed and implemented by a third-party specialist. How does Bloomberg consistently differentiate itself and Bloomberg AIM across the buy side in what is a mature and highly competitive market? 

Manju Sakhrani, Bloomberg: I would say Bloomberg excels in three areas: first, there’s the integration into the workflow, second is adaptability and third is our customer service.

To break that down, AIM is a seamlessly integrated solution designed to support clients’ investment management needs. It integrates their positions and transactional-level information across the Bloomberg Terminal. Clients, therefore, do not need to purchase additional data or technology to connect with OMSs … and we all know how costly that can be. AIM’s advantage is that it brings all workflows into a succinct, centralized system, reducing the number of applications it needs to integrate with, all with consistent data in a user system support structure offering visibility across the entire enterprise workflow.

AIM is also fully adaptable regardless of a firm’s size. Clients can tailor functionality for large funds to small start-ups, and we can customize to clients’ various needs.

Finally, AIM’s customer service is the gold standard in the industry, with real-time customer support in 26 languages and specialists worldwide covering all different asset classes. It is something we’re very proud of.

What are the problems and challenges facing Bloomberg AIM’s users right now, and how is Bloomberg addressing these challenges as an organization and also from AIM’s perspective?   

Manju Sakhrani: Asset managers are currently bombarded with information, including research, news and market-related data, while simultaneously managing competing demands around fee compression, market consolidation and investment transparency in an increasingly complex regulatory environment. Aggregating, analysing and acting on all of this information in an efficient manner is an ever-increasing challenge, especially for today’s investment professionals.

In Asia, fragmented market infrastructure and the regulatory landscape, insufficient liquidity and less efficient settlement processes have made buy-side firms’ operations even more challenging. And, for the firms headquartered in Asia or Asian firms with global operations, they may face challenges in providing effective remote management and oversight of operations in other markets.

All of these are pressing demands requiring technology and solutions that can provide robust, native integration of data and workflows across markets, users and points of decision throughout the entire life cycle of an investment.

As part of Bloomberg’s buy-side offering, AIM provides an OMS that stands uniquely at the heart of a robust, single-enterprise solution, combining the value of the Bloomberg Terminal, data and electronic venues with our end-to-end workflow solutions. Bloomberg AIM is used by nearly 15,000 professionals across 900 client firms worldwide. These combined manage more than $22 trillion of assets.

Let’s look into the future—six months, nine months, 12 months down the line. We know technology doesn’t stand still, and this is especially the case from Bloomberg’s perspective. There is always new functionality being drip-fed into the system. What does Bloomberg AIM’s development road map look like right now, and what are the new features and functions users can look forward to in the near future?   

Manju Sakhrani: AIM is a hosted solution across multiple data centers dedicated solely to our products, services and operations. This allows us to continuously develop enhancements and deploy updates to clients as soon as they are available, eliminating wait times and additional costs required for new functions.

I’d like to share a couple of those new key themes we’re looking at. First, we’re focusing on expanding our asset class coverage and analytics, catering for more multi-asset workflows and complex derivatives. Second, we’re focusing on improved product connectivity through enhanced interoperability across enterprise products, and delivering a robust application programming interface library. Third, we are streamlining and automating complex workflows by integrating analytics across the investment life cycle with embedded automation to unlock insights and enable exception-based decision-making. Finally, we’re looking to enhance investment scale, reliability and customization, which will allow users to expand orders, trade, allocate processing and optimize performance, all while providing data transparency across the platform.

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