TradingScreen Looks to Asia, New Order Management Products for Growth

The buy-side order and execution management system (OEMS) world has been in a state of flux thanks to a string of huge acquisitions. Much of 2018 was dominated by mega-deals involving prominent companies, including State Street’s acquisition of Charles River, SS&C Technologies’ purchase of Eze Software, and Ion buying Fidessa.

TradingScreen is looking to capitalize on this upheaval by expanding its presence in Asia and adding new tools to its offering to match the changing needs of the hedge fund community. Chris Hollands, head of European and North American sales and account management at TradingScreen, says the company sees an opportunity to expand the product in order to add more traditional order-management services.

“Most of the remits in the EMS world now have elements of order management. Things like allocations, short-sell management and order marking are OMS features that have crept into execution management. We work with hedge funds in the Asia-Pacific region where they use us for both order and execution management,” Hollands says. “We’ve replaced their OMS since their requirements are lighter than a long-only outfit. Our expectation is that this is something that can continue to grow for us.”

The company wants to expand and enhance many of its offerings. Hollands says that the vendor will begin offering an algo wheel that can be customized by clients, and add more asset classes like crypto, where TradingScreen will aggregate liquidity and connect to exchanges.

The company will also be rolling out a new version of its basket-trading module with an overhauled visualization component that will offer more granular insights so that traders can drill down further into each asset in the basket. The new version will be released within the first half of 2020.

The company is also focused on providing more support for APIs. There is a need for flexible access to their system as more quantitative brokers are building their own algo wheels.

“There used to be a lot of point-to-point FIX connections, but big buy-side firms are now multi-broker. We see a lot of these firms, especially long-only asset managers, [using] REST APIs to connect with their OMS,” Hollands says.

TradingScreen also partners with SimCorp to integrate SimCorp’s Dimension platform with TradingScreen’s TradeSmart EMS to create an OEMS for multi-asset coverage.

No Sell Side

TradingScreen, however, is not looking to expand into the sell-side OEMS space. In April, WatersTechnology first reported that Bloomberg was exiting its Sell-Side Execution and Order Management Solutions (SSEOMS) line of business.

Companies like Itiviti and InfoReach are looking to seize on Bloomberg’s rollback—Bloomberg still has its sell-side focused Trade Order Management Solutions (TOMS) platform—but TradingScreen will continue to focus on the buy side.

Hollands says that a sell-side OEMS usually requires people on-site and there are infrastructure connections that need to be customized, which TradingScreen—with its preference for scalability and its software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model—does not specialize in.

“The market is in flux, yes, and sure, it’s tempting to enter that market. But we want to focus on our core market,” Hollands says. “We do have some functionalities for order management, but only for the buy side. Sell-side OEMS is not our focus, but if our competitors want to go there then great. Sell side is such a different market to support and we like our core strength.”