Front office leadership series
Contributors
Grant Lowden
Global Head of Front Office Sales
SimCorp
Matt Desmond
Enterprise Architect
Cutter Associates
Our Front Office Series unveils the breakthrough strategies reshaping investment management. Five game-changing articles reveal exactly how tomorrow's winners are pulling ahead—and the specific moves your firm needs to make now. Which strategies will define your competitive advantage?
Part 4 of 5: The new era of OMS and EMS - Beyond the Swivel Chair
The trading desk stands at the epicenter of transformation in investment management. Long-established boundaries between order management systems (OMS) and execution management systems (EMS) are dissolving as firms confront an uncomfortable reality: the traditional "swivel chair" approach—with traders constantly switching between disconnected platforms—has become unsustainable in today's high-velocity markets.
This convergence is giving rise to unified OEMS platforms that synchronize activities in real-time across the investment lifecycle. These integrated systems address the increasingly complex workflows spanning portfolio management, trading, risk, and compliance processes. By creating a seamless data environment, this integration not only enhances decision quality—from idea generation through execution—but significantly reduces operational risk through elimination of reconciliation points and processing delays. Matt Desmond, Enterprise Architect at Cutter Associates, adds,
Advanced OEMS platforms are introducing powerful capabilities that traditionally belonged only to specialized EMS systems—advanced algorithmic trading tools, sophisticated transaction cost analysis, and integrated pre-trade analytics
Four market forces driving convergence
The path forward: The evolution of trading technology
The most advantageous position for asset managers is maintaining control of their foundational trading capabilities while selectively accessing specialized tools for specific use cases. This balanced approach delivers both operational stability and technological flexibility.
Supporting this evolution, API-first architectures are emerging to enable more interoperable frameworks, directly addressing the optionality sophisticated managers require. Meanwhile, market dynamics are encouraging providers to adapt their business models and explore new partnerships and integrations, particularly affecting mid-tier providers seeking to differentiate their offerings.
These industry shifts will accelerate the transformation of EMS payment models, with more providers transitioning from broker-funded to buy-side charging as traditional revenue streams become increasingly unreliable. In response to these changes, enhanced collaboration tools are developing to facilitate integrated investment decision-making across previously siloed functions.
"Asset managers who thrive will embrace strategic optionality, avoiding both unnecessary complexity and dangerous capability gaps. This balanced approach will provide the stability required for operational resilience while maintaining the flexibility to adapt as trading requirements and market structures continue to evolve, positioning firms for sustained competitive advantage in an increasingly dynamic landscape," Lowden concludes.
Next in the series: How AI is Transforming Front Office Investment Intelligence
Join us for the final article in our series where you can learn how Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is breaking through the experimentation barrier, why human-AI partnership models are dominating successful deployments, and what architectural choices will separate AI leaders from laggards in the race to transform investment decision-making.
Read previous articles in the series