A hybrid approach towards automation
Winner of the 2023 European Markets Choice Award for Best Equity E/OMS, Broadridge is well aware of the volatility and complexity of the current equities market. Shantanu Goyal, head of product for sell-side OMS, gives us more insight into what differentiates its offering – and why automation is still important, despite the rise of AI.
What differentiates the Broadridge OMS?
Broadridge’s OMS is multi-asset, multi-workflow and global, built on a modular software architecture to enable clients to take a phased approach to OMS transformation.
With support for high- and low-touch, programme trading, market making, execution tools, compliance, middle office, and deep people expertise – it fuels innovation and efficiency in sell side trading.
What is the biggest technology differentiator in the OMS space right now?
Modularity and interoperability are becoming a business imperative. Legacy systems are often one size fits all, limited in terms of the depth and breadth of their functionality, depressing performance and requiring multiple platforms.
To truly delivery for clients, enabling them to rapidly evolve their business, OMS’s need to be modern, flexible and global. They need to enable firms to deploy integrated best of breed solutions across fix connectivity, high and low-touch order management, market connectivity, and middle office.
How is the current market volatility impacting the use of E/OMS?
To reduce slippage in volatile markets E/OMS’s need to provide traders with the ability to act fast, be efficient, and quickly surface relevant analytical and order data. For traders the objective is all about optimising the execution process in real-time.
Interoperability, analytics, automation, cross-desk workflows, and exception management all play a key role. It is important to innovate to enable traders to seek cross-workflow liquidity by incorporating complementary principal trading workflows and advanced analytics.
How have OMS evolved in recent years and what are the biggest areas of progress?
High touch traders are looking for more automation, low touch traders are looking for support of more complex trading workflows, both are looking for integrated analytics. OMS platforms need to have lower latency and higher throughput, be multi-asset and have globally distributed architectures.
This means vendors must rethink the old operating models, experiment more, and become more agile in their ability to respond to customers and rivals. This is where we think the biggest challenges lie ahead.
Where do you see your OMS going in the future and what new functionality do you plan to introduce?
We are seeing more and more demand for global and multi-asset order management capabilities to enable efficiencies in both trading and technology. Our focus is both on horizontal and vertical simplification.
With horizontal simplification we are leveraging our modular architecture to create a global integrated platform with regional and multi-asset workflows. With vertical simplification we enable firms to simplify the trade lifecycle by creating an integrated front-to-back ecosystem with straight-through-processing, integrated data, and centralised exception management.
What are the biggest influences on how your users leverage your OMS, and what is on your/their priority list for 2024?
AI and automation have been a large topic of discussion in 2023 and areas of innovation at Broadridge. Our view is, while it is unlikely we get to 100% automation for OMS’s since a smart educated trader will have an edge over a computer or AI model in more complex situations, the objective should be to enable a hybrid approach. Introducing AI / ML and creating decision support frameworks to harmonise, interpret and aggregate analytical data, and surface actionable recommendations, enabling traders to optimise the execution process in real-time.
©Markets Media Europe 2023
