Buy-Side Technology Awards 2016: Best Buy-Side OMS—IHS Markit

IHS Markit thinkFolio has its roots deep within the UK and European fixed-income markets, although it had already branched out its multi-asset capabilities prior to entering the IHS Markit stable. However, it still retains an innate agility from its past as a modeling specialist. The platform finds itself in a stronger position than ever before, with a list of over 3,100 users on board with over $2 trillion in assets under management, collectively, and has made inroads into the North American, Australian and New Zealand markets in recent years.

The relationship between thinkFolio, the flagship IHS Markit EDM platform and WSO Software—IHS Markit’s loan portfolio software division—means that the firm is able to adapt to changing client requirements and to deliver flexible loan solutions for an increasingly important asset class, with greater demand for clearer understanding of loans exposure and consolidation with other instruments under management.

Over the past 12 months, IHS Markit has focused on enhancing thinkFolio’s usability for the front office with a particular focus on calculator functions. The portfolio modeler functionality, which previously only allowed portfolios to be viewed as columns with holdings as rows, now has the option to be pivoted with users selecting individual securities, enabling them to manage multiple diverse portfolios in a single modeling session.

The IHS Markit enhancement cycle runs on a quarterly basis and is often informed directly by the input of numerous portfolio managers, rather than by over-arching industry trends alone. The company will continue its integration between thinkFolio and bond reference and market data vendors to reduce integration headaches for users who require external data, as well as exploring the potential of application programming interfaces (APIs) that would allow users to export data back out of the system and feed it into third-party systems, and HTML5 technology to increase the platform’s web capabilities. 

The platform finds itself in a stronger position than ever before, with a list of over 3,100 users on board with over $2 trillion in assets under management, collectively, and has made inroads into the North American, Australian and New Zealand markets in recent years.