Traders Magazine spoke with Shantanu Goyal, Head of Agency Trading, Product Management, Broadridge, who won Best Order Management System at the 2024 Markets Choice Awards.
Please tell us about your OMS and its most important features.
Broadridge’s OMS is a unified, multi-asset trading platform with sophisticated automation and rich workflow functionality fuelling innovation and efficiency in sell side trading. Covering the entire trading lifecycle, our OMS seamlessly supports High Touch, Low Touch, Portfolio Trading, Market Making and Automation, Connectivity and Onboarding Services, along with powerful tools for Compliance and Risk, and an integrated Middle Office.
How does your OMS differentiate in a competitive landscape?
Our solution is multi-asset, multi-workflow and global, delivering all of the battle-tested technology, granular workflow capabilities and specialized support to trade virtually any asset class in any region – but these aren’t the only differences. By building our system on a modular software architecture based on independent components, we enable clients to take a phased approach to OMS transformation, prioritizing specific functions as appropriate.
Our distributed technology stack with integrated front, middle, and back-offices maximises both efficiencies and firm-wide visibility, simplifying complex workflows.
How have OMS users’ needs evolved over the years and how has Broadridge adapted?
Today’s sell-side firms are facing a wide range of economic and competitive pressures. Forced to contend with growing volumes, shrinking margins, client adoption of multi-asset and global strategies and technological innovation across the landscape, broker-dealers are increasingly finding that their existing OMS) are not up to the task.
Our focus has been on adapting our OMS focused on some key attributes:
· Modern –modular software architecture with built in FDC3 compliant interoperability, delivered as an integrated platform.
· Multi-Asset – Maximising efficiency means having a single point of access and connectivity, along with synergetic workflows and asset class specific tools and functions.
· Multi-Workflow – supporting full spectrum of high-, low-, and principal workflows with true cross workflow integration and analytics.
· Global – support global sales and trading with regional specificities through distributed scalable architecture and unified views.
Every firm is unique, so there’s no single right way to achieving OMS transformation. That said, many of our clients have taken a general path to ramp up incrementally over time. It means sell-side firms can pursue modernization and simplification in a way that best meets their needs, migrating onto new features and workflows while also consolidating across asset classes and workflows.
What strategy are you using to improve clients experience for your business?
Interoperability is becoming a business imperative, so our OMS integrates with our automation products and incorporates complementary principal workflows.
Traders have access to unified agency and principal trading workflows allowing for true cross workflow integration. This creates a unified workspace allowing traders to better seek liquidity for their clients by leveraging position management, FX hedging, market making, RFQs, smart order routing or utilizing systematic internalizes for matched trades.
We have partnered with interop.io to evolve Broadridge’s OMS into an interoperability hub, providing one interface for traders to access unique functionality from different products.
What are your current initiatives at Broadridge?
As part of our Order Management platform we launched our Futures and Options SaaS offering earlier this year expanding on existing derivative trading capabilities with a top 3 FCM as an anchor client. This is a comprehensive solution tailored for futures commission merchants (FCMs) and agency brokers, providing robust order and execution management capabilities, access to a diverse range of global listed derivatives markets along with comprehensive pre-trade risk management and middle office functionality.
This represents a significant enhancement to our existing capabilities, enabling the delivery of new functionalities for global institutions operating in the Futures & Options agency execution business, offering a distributed architecture that enables operations from any jurisdiction and benefitting from Broadridge’s broader multi-asset class trading and operations offering.
