The trading desk’s holy grail: An integrated investment management platform

In a recent Aite report, Buy-Side EMS: The Tech Stacks of High Society, the author commented, "An integrated product that combines the best of the OMS and the EMS is hailed as the holy grail for buy-side trading desks." As funds struggle with disparate systems that challenge their ability to construct an accurate view of portfolio holdings, risks and exposures, compliance, end-to-end audit logs, and post-trade operations, they are increasingly looking for an integrated system to manage order management system (OMS) and execution management system (EMS) workflows.

With this in mind and as the EMS market continues to evolve and consolidate, many execution platforms and trading facilities are looking for opportunities to integrate their platforms with other systems, in particular investment management platforms. We are responding to this market demand by ensuring that key EMS and execution platforms are fully certified with our SaaS based investment management platform, thinkFolio.

Collaborating with premium EMS providers is a key part of our strategy to extend thinkFolio and our execution capabilities. It is allowing us to provide our clients with a highly scalable and flexible investment management platform, while simultaneously offering them the flexibility to select a best-of-breed EMS that dovetails with their execution requirements. Clients are now beginning to benefit from a seamless trading experience that improves scalability, reduces interface complexity, enhances system integration and streamlines the investment management and trading processes.

In many ways, this approach provides the best of both worlds for asset managers. They can continue to reap the benefits of a best-of-breed approach with highly specialized and sophisticated systems for specific activities, while also experiencing a seamless integration between thinkFolio and their EMS to streamline their trading process.

We have recently supported announcements from our EMS partners, FlexTrade and TradingScreen, about their certification with thinkFolio. We are also collaborating with Trumid and OTCX and expect many more to follow, so that our mutual clients can benefit from an integrated platform.

To read more about the FlexTrade collaboration, click here, and for the TradingScreen one, click here.

S&P Global provides industry-leading data, software and technology platforms and managed services to tackle some of the most difficult challenges in financial markets. We help our customers better understand complicated markets, reduce risk, operate more efficiently and comply with financial regulation.

This article was published by S&P Global Market Intelligence and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.