What is an Order Management System?
An order management system (OMS) as the name suggests is used to execute securities orders in an efficient and cost-effective manner. Brokers and dealers use order management systems when filling orders for various types of securities and track the progress of each order.
uTrade OMS is a multi-functional, multi-asset trading, compliance, market data, and connectivity to the buy side and execution venues. uTrade can enhance your trading workflows with its end-to-end solution, encapsulating deep functionalities ranging from portfolio management to compliance reporting and algorithmic trading.
Right from receiving incoming care orders, processing and distributing them internally between teams & algos, uTrade OMS helps in routing these orders to global trading destinations, managing compliance and transaction cost analytics for optimal execution.
The Sell Side Needs More Than Just Order Routing Platforms : Key Challenges
Latency management
Latency has evolved to be a key differentiator and competitive advantage for brokers in capital markets, and most firms are looking hard for ways to cut out microseconds in their trade execution workflows.
Successful trade execution demands price discovery in microseconds while the data still reflects the actual market. The time interval between when a trade order is sent and when that same order is acknowledged and acted upon by the receiving party is getting shorter.
There is a growing realisation in the industry that faster internal networks and state-of-the art client-side messaging transport have the biggest impact on reducing latency.
Precise execution management
Precise execution is one of the most critical challenges in trade order management. It involves a lot of steps including prioritisation of factors, analysis and selection of execution venues, linkage to execution venues, creation of ‘best execution’ policy, execution of orders, periodic review of factors and venues.
Best execution is increasingly also becoming a compliance requirement. The challenge here is that best execution policies and order routing algorithms vary vastly from firm to firm, often best execution policies are unstructured content that guide business decisions to be made.
Firms are now struggling to formalise these policies and incorporate the rules into OMS.
Transaction cost analytics (TCA)
TCA helps in comparison of a firm’s trading history with the universe of executed trades, thereby assigning execution quality metrics to brokers. The need right now is for a credible framework for effective analysis. An effective TCA framework should include comprehensive pre- (cost queries, algorithmic recommendations, risk bid analysis) and post- (end of day, longer-term reports, consulting) trade analysis by industry, country, past performance and risk characteristics. The post-trade reports need to provide detailed analytics that should help determine the trade’s impact, measure the overall performance of the transaction and analyse the execution quality.
Algorithmic trading
With the ever increasing volume and frequency of trade executions, it becomes even more important to optimize and automate your order executions and allocations across various venues, instruments and order types. Algorithms help traders obtain the optimaal execution prices for large orders, without significantly affecting the stock’s price or increasing the purchase costs, and also enable real time performance monitoring, automated hedging and risk control measures.
Broadening functionality
As OMSes evolve into sophisticated solutions that provide automated order management, intelligent portfolio modeling, up-to-date compliance management, interactive reporting features, portfolio rebalancing and post-trade support, sell side firms demand more from their legacy OMS deployments and are keen to refurbish them into highly functional, versatile and scalable care order management solutions.
uTrade Addresses the Unmet Needs of Sales Traders
uTrade has built a brand new Sell Side OMS for sales traders from the ground-up, with industry leaders and domain experts, to deliver products that very thoughtfully address the evolving market requirements and make operations faster, smoother and scalable for sales trading teams across the globe.
uTrade OMS is one system which provides numerous advantages:
1. uTrade OMS helps in connecting and trading on dozens of global stock exchanges ,OTC Gateways, Private Liquidity Pools, and other global markets from a single setup. uTrade OMS also aggregates market data and deploys smart order routing across various functions and algos packed in the uTrade terminal.
2. uTrade OMS helps in engaging clients from across the globe using either native uTrade professional trading terminals or third party EMS ( Bloomberg, Refinitive, Fidessa, etc. across any FIX version).
3. uTrade allows access to clients with state of the art workflows in the system like, no touch flow, low touch flow (for One Touch Order Approval/Conversion) and high touch flow (for staged/care/worked orders)
uTrade OMS is making portfolio management smarter:
1. uTrade OMS facilitates order/trade flow between Buy Side, Trading Venues Portfolio Managers and Executing Dealers with the uTrade Care Order Management solution Conveniently accept/reject/split/re delegate/reassign staged orders or their components (Lines and Waves) to internal desks/groups at any time during the order lifecycle.
2. uTrade OMS helps in executing client orders manually or via in-built automated execution services, or black box execution, or a combination of all of these get easy access to performance monitoring with VWAP benchmarking for each care order and its component.
3. uTrade’s Global Order Book provides an unmatched transparency and visibility of all order executions with filtered/permissioned versions for different users on the same setup Smart reporting for order fills are disseminated to clients with a configurable lock and release mechanism.
4. uTrade keeps you updated with latest features/optimized with regular application upgrades in order to offer minimum maintenance and scope of error. uTrade’s Utility Kits helps in automating a variety of daily activities. With uTrade you experience the lowest resolution TAT in the industry for any issues resolution or custom development requests.
5. uTrade supports smart cluster management to ensure that trading operations are not affected if broker’s primary server is unexpectedly compromised, by switching to standby server (which can be hosted in broker LAN/Exchange co location as per broker preference), without any
loss in active order information or connections during migration.
6. On demand uTrade also offers client site application support services and user groups onboarding programs with constant remote support
uTrade Care Order Management System comes with a dedicated FIX Admin module and a Risk Management module to manage all your client connectivity, permissions, trading templates, risk limits, margin requirements, and more. Salient features of these offerings include:
- 300+ risk configurations to control client and dealer trading privileges
- Initiate and Terminate new or existing FIX sessions from front end admin screens directly, alter individual session sequence numbers as well
- Monitor latency and heartbeat stats for active FIX connections with clients and exchanges
- Register new client details and their preferred order routes, smart order routing preferences, etc
- Build rules for automatically transforming certain client order states (convert a one touch order to a staged care order, etc and alter FIX tag values in the pre processing stage
- Map exchange connectivity and trading permissions for each FIX client
- Customize the content of execution reports, ATP, LTP, duration, etc to be sent to FIX client
- Freedom to configure custom FIX tags and values for different in built algo parameters for each FIX client as needed
- Feature to add symbol dictionaries and map symbology templates on the go, to enable communication with clients using third party OMS/EMS that uses BBG, ISIN, SEDOL, RIC, etc symbology
- Smart persistence mechanisms deployed, so in case of user logout or server restarts, all information is retrieved safely
