Thursday, April 28, 2016 Stamford, CT USA — As global equity markets become more complex, buy-side traders are expressing a strong desire for integrated systems for order and execution management. To date, however, the industry has not yet come through with a singular solution to meet that demand.
A new report, Move Over, Neighbor: EMS Establishes Residency on the Desktop, from Greenwich Associates, shows that 70% of the 258 buy-side traders around the world surveyed for a recent study use third-party execution management systems (EMS). Fully 61% of the traders would prefer a comprehensive OMS/EMS platform.
Despite this preference for integrated systems, nearly nine out of 10 traders say they have no plans to change EMS providers in the next year—a finding that reflects both a level of comfort with existing functionality and the continued lack of a true comprehensive OMS/EMS solution. Currently, traders say they maintain the same EMS for an average of seven years.
A Complex Market Requires More Sophisticated Tools
As equity execution venues and tools proliferate, traders want more control over order handling. Active traders require trading functionality such as configurable trading blotters, real-time depth of market data, charting, and alerts.
“Traditional order management systems certainly provide the baseline capabilities to route orders via brokers’ algorithms but lack the additional controls and color that give those active equities traders an edge,” says Richard Johnson, Vice President in the Greenwich Associates Market Structure and Technology Group. “For that, buy-side traders are turning to EMS providers.”
Bloomberg and ITG Most Popular EMS Providers
The biggest beneficiaries are providers like Bloomberg and ITG, whose EMS platforms are claiming real estate on growing numbers of buy-side desktops. Beyond those systems, three third-party vendors, Eze, Charles River and Portware, are beginning to make headway in packaging their EMS and order management systems (OMS) platforms together. Expanding the field to secondary providers, Nomura subsidiary broker Instinet and fintech firm REDIPlus also hit the radar.