Benefits and Challenges for the Multi-Asset Front Office

Author: Beau Alexander, product manager, SunGard’s brokerage business With a single global order management system (OMS) for all their assets, sell-side firms will be in a stronger position to improve data management and compliance, streamline processes and reduce costs. But in the front office itself, what could consolidated technology mean for highly specialized trading? As TABB Group has noted in a recent research paper based on its global survey of brokerage firms, the desire to consolidate OMS functionality across all asset classes is top-of-mind today across the sell side. There are a number of business reasons for this, the most pressing being regulatory compliance. The more systems that a front office uses for order management, the more data sets it generates. As a result, it becomes more difficult to create a central repository of data for reporting purposes, and to gain a real-time aggregated view of holdings and trading activity.