With buy-side firms being under pressure to operate at scale, there is a need to recognize the growing relevance and importance of technology, according to Ian Peckett, Global Head of Buyside Product at Bloomberg.
“The industry is moving broadly from ‘the School of Arts to the School of Engineering’. If you’re going to operate at scale, you’re going to need solid data, you’re going to need solid technology, you’re going to need solid workflow,” he told Traders Magazine.
“I think firms need to recognize that the change is going to be a constant, and the pace of that change is just going to increase. You need to stay agile, you need to stay nimble, and you need to make sure that you’re in a position to respond to those new opportunities quickly,” he added.
Key to that, according to Peckett, is making sure that you’ve got the right technology in place and the right technology partner: “You don’t want a partner who’s just meeting your current needs. You want a technology partner who’s ahead of what you need to do so that when you want to move, they’ve already laid the rails and they’ve already got those capabilities.”
“I think for anybody who is going to wait and see, there’s a big risk that they get left behind,” he stressed.
According to Peckett, whereas before technology only supported the operating model, now it can either “define the operating model or, with increased levels of automation, become the operating model”.
He further said that the cost and the value of delivering great technology outcomes is increasing, because people are getting more sophisticated in terms of their workflow.
“We are using technology now in ways that go way beyond what we were a few years ago. Technology has moved significantly up the value chain, and therefore I think the amount of money that firms should be investing in technology has and should be going up,” he said.
According to Peckett, before the Covid-19 pandemic the buy-side has been dealing with margin compression, increased regulatory scrutiny, pursuit of yield in a tough market, and generally increased expectations from their clients regarding transparency and availability of information.
“The pandemic has both increased the need for those changes and made them harder to achieve,” he said.,
“With your workforce distributed, and everybody dealing with , volatility and uncertainty in the market, there’s been a certain reluctance to embark on major change activities,” he said.
“That’s part of why I think that we, at Bloomberg, are so proud of the fact that we were able to onboard 100 buy-side clients over the last 12 months,” he added.
Peckett said that Bloomberg Buy-Side Solutions supports the entire investment lifecycle – from research and idea generation, portfolio, risk management, order and execution management, to post-trade and operations, compliance and risk oversight, as well as technology and data management.
“Even within those six pillars we have a broad set of capabilities that are complimentary,” he said.
“I think what really sets Bloomberg apart is both the breadth of our coverage, and the richness of coverage across each of those segments,” he added.
Peckett said that Bloomberg is continuously upgrading its products: “We continue to invest at the very core of our OMS platform to make sure it’s able to handle the sophistication and the levels of throughput that are demanded from our clients with the most complex concerns.”
“We’re really excited about the portfolio management space and we’re spending a significant amount of intellectual capital and focus on that at the moment, as well as in the post-trade space.”
“We’ve just released the next generation of our equity risk models, which will be followed up over the course of the next six to 12 months with our fixed income and multi asset class risk models,” he concluded.
