Waters Rankings 2014 Winners’ Circle: Bloomberg

What are the typical features your clients are looking for?
Dan Matthies, global head of Bloomberg AIM: Buy-side clients are struggling with the rise in volume and diversity of data consumed by traders on the desktop and middle- and back-office applications. Our clients strive to achieve alpha, reduce portfolio costs, manage risk and compliance, and attain best execution. For buy-side institutions, Bloomberg Asset and Investment Manager (AIM) delivers global, multi-asset solutions for front-end portfolio, trading and middle- and back-office operations. AIM offers an integrated suite of solutions including: decision support and portfolio management; pre-trade, post-execution and end-of-day compliance; order management, electronic trading and execution; and post-trade matching, settlement, reconciliation, performance measurement, and data aggregation and reporting.

How does AIM tie in with wider Bloomberg services?
Matthies: Bloomberg AIM delivers solutions to a range of buy-side firms in 87 countries through an integrated, single-desktop platform that provides access to liquidity, news, data and analytics across all asset classes. Bloomberg’s AIM Analytics is an integrated solution to optimize firms’ workflows by providing tools to understand portfolio structure, position analysis, active exposures, and forward-looking risk. Seamlessly integrated with Bloomberg AIM is a suite of trading capabilities and execution management tools for the front office. Bloomberg EMS (Execution Management System) routes equities, futures and options to nearly 2,500 brokers and liquidity destinations, globally. It is a broker-neutral tool with real-time analysis on working orders for equities, futures, and options. The suite also includes Indications of Interest (IOIs) and trade advertisements, and transaction-cost analytics (BTCA). Bloomberg Tradebook is a global agency broker that provides multi-asset, multi-currency trading solutions to actively manage complex trading strategies in over 100 global exchanges.

What challenges do your clients face, and how does Bloomberg PolarLake address them?
John Randles, CEO, Bloomberg PolarLake: Firms face many simultaneous challenges. These cover meeting the data management demands of improving data quality, data architecture and data integration, together with creating the necessary data policy standards and positioning the organization to apply business intelligence in the most effective way possible. These demands are driven internally by business requirements and externally through regulation. Bloomberg PolarLake delivers a managed service for data management that centrally acquires, manages and distributes core business operations data, including reference, ratings, pricing, entity, index, corporate actions, and trade data. Financial clients of the Bloomberg PolarLake Managed Service benefit from lower costs and increased data quality, achieved through applying a combination of people, process and technology. The Bloomberg PolarLake Managed Service meets the needs of a next-generation EDM managed service by executing both effective common data processing (leveraging over 16,000 data quality rules generating significant economies of scale) and client-specific business rules.

What areas will you focus on over the next 12 months?
Randles: We see development in the area of predictive data quality, together with the relevant levels of transparency and application of business knowledge through innovative technology. We also see the continued demand for features driven by regulation and the ability to build and supply flexible client reporting ever more quickly and at sensible cost. These demands are being driven by our clients’ customers looking to firms to widen their services as they are in turn seen as the experts and source of these services. We also see the wider integration of reference data management with other areas of the business.

Which features give TOMS an edge in the OMS space?
Eric Lewin, COO, Bloomberg TOMS: The OMS space, particularly in fixed income, is evolving as market structure and regulations influence how our clients do business and expand regionally and globally. Dealers are facing uncertainty, given the new regulatory paradigm. The marketplace is becoming more electronic, capital requirements are changing, and there is a bigger focus on reducing operational risk and total cost of ownership. Bloomberg TOMS is differentiated by being the only cross-asset class solution that integrates front-office risk and electronic trading with middle office, operations, and market standard data and analytics in a real-time environment.

In which areas do you see growth, or plan to target?
Lewin: First, we think firms will make investments in advanced fixed-income electronic trading tools as the market becomes more electronic. We also see firms expanding into new asset classes to find volatility and chase alpha, and growth in the agency trading model. The role of the sales trader continues to evolve, and with that, firms are making investments in market intelligence and sales trader productivity tools. Bloomberg TOMS is making its own investments to bring our clients the connectivity and workflow management tools they need to thrive. This year we launched Bloomberg ETOMS, enabling dealers to connect with electronic markets and optimize trading workflow with a suite of trading tools. We are also working to enhance the user experience for traders and salespeople across all asset classes. W