Charles River Development won Best Order Management System (OMS) in the 2020 Markets Choice Awards.

Markets Media caught up with Michael Beattie, Director of Product Strategy at CRD, to learn more.

What is your reaction to CRD winning Best OMS in the 2020 Markets Choice Awards?

First and foremost, our thoughts go out to the thousands of traders using our technology under these uncharted market conditions. Charles River is honored to accept this prestigious award, as it underscores our long-held belief that integrated, multi-asset order and execution management systems provide traders with a superior technology platform in today’s market environment.

Please describe what the product is all about — what are the primary capabilities and how does it differentiate?

Charles River’s OEMS provides an order management system seamlessly integrated with cross asset execution, data, FIX connectivity, and trade analytics. Trade decision support capabilities help traders find liquidity, execute trades across all asset classes and currencies, and ensure trades are compliant.

By combining OMS and EMS functionality, Charles River provides the tools traders need to work more productively from a single trading blotter. Traders can manage trade execution strategies, streamline complex workflows into “one-click” execution, act on an entire program as if acting on a single order, and monitor market data and security updates for active orders.

Charles River’s approach simplifies the trader’s job and delivers real time decision support. Full integration with portfolio management functions helps enable better communication between traders and portfolio managers. Interfaces with sell-side and execution venues support cross-asset class coverage and seamless integration with the Charles River FIX network provides highly available access to global execution venues.

What do institutional traders need most from their OMS/OEMS?

Traders using Charles River continue to prioritize faster time-to-information, greater workflow automation and seamless connectivity to incumbent and emerging global liquidity venues across asset classes.

What have been recent accomplishments / current initiatives at CRD with regard to the OMS/OEMS product?

The evolution of Charles River’s Inventory Hub is an important extension of our OEMS. Dealers have significantly reduced their inventories, driven by cost pressures and regulatory changes. This has hampered price discovery and impacted liquidity across global markets. In response, hundreds of liquidity venues have launched, with the goal of capturing buy-side order flow. While providing traders with new execution options, the sheer number of venues has also increased market fragmentation. The Inventory Hub processes and aggregates inventory across a number of the largest dealers and venues. Clients can view this inventory in the OEMS, receive updated indications of interest (IOIs) and quotes from dealers, and place orders for a full range of products and asset classes.

How has CRD fared amid the extraordinary recent market conditions? Is the OMS/OEMS more valuable amid high volatility?

Our partnerships with institutional investment managers and their valuable insights on product functionality and development priorities are in part responsible for why we have garnered so many industry accolades.

Peak trading volumes driven by heightened market volatility during the pandemic serve as the ultimate performance test of our technology. The ability to trade all asset classes and view the entire investment lifecycle from one platform is a significant productivity enhancement for traders globally. Most importantly, our tightly coupled compliance engine helps guard against inadvertent breaches of risk limits on highly volatile days.

What does the future hold for CRD’s OMS/OEMS technology?

Charles River is building out significant new functionality in a number of areas, notably trade automation, portfolio trading, and advanced visualization and analytics. We are also excited to see that our third-party provider ecosystem continues to enjoy robust growth as we on-board new liquidity venues, analytics and data providers, and innovative FinTech application developers.