Firms using Bloomberg’s Sell-Side Execution and Order Man­agement Solutions (SSEOMS) have until April 2021 to find a new platform provider. About two months ago, the tech giant said that it was exiting two key lines of business: its SSEOMS unit and its Know-Your-Customer (KYC) business, which includes Entity Exchange and Entity Intelligence.

The KYC space is saturated and difficult, so it wasn’t a huge surprise to see Bloomberg back away from that sector. While order and execution management (OEMS) is hot as ever, sell-side firms are no longer looking for an equity-specialist OMS, which is what SSEOMS is; rather, they want a multi-asset-class platform that can handle more complex functions. For that, Bloomberg has its Trade Order Management Solutions (TOMS) unit to fill the void. 

Enter Itiviti

But Bloomberg’s exit does open the door for others to poach clients of SSEOMS who perhaps are not as excited to jump on the TOMS bandwagon, for one reason or another. One vendor that has been pretty vocal and open to helping Bloomberg’s clients migrate over to its own multi-asset OMS is Swedish trading and technology provider Itiviti. 

As an example, it recently brought on former regional manager and head of sales and services for Asia-Pacific at Bloomberg, Frederic Villain as its new head of agency trading sales for Asia. 

Villain most recently oversaw Bloomberg’s SSEOMS business for the Asia-Pacific region. He will assist in executing Itiviti’s overall strategy in the sell-side OMS arena.

Itiviti’s newest hire is in line with what CEO Robert Mackay told WatersTechnology in a recent interview. Mackay said the company is working on building out its capacity to better handle migration projects. Although in the past it has migrated several of Bloomberg’s clients over to its own OMS, it isn’t taking any chances. It is for this reason that Itiviti is actively recruiting Bloomberg employees who have worked on SSEOMS. 

Itiviti won’t be the only company looking to create new business off of this event. It makes sense.

Wei-Shen Wong

“We’ll be getting a variety of talent from the SSEOMS organization into those roles,” he said. While he added that some of Bloomberg’s SSEOMS’ staff have already found roles within the same company, Itiviti is open to onboarding as many SSEOMS staff as possible. (See page 4 for more information on Itiviti’s plans.)

New Blood

As you’ve probably heard before, Isaac Newton’s Third Law is that for every action, there is an equal and opposition reaction. Other big tech firms are likely to follow Bloomberg’s footsteps and look to streamline their product offering. While there’s great value in being a company that can cover the full trade lifecycle end-to-end, it’s also easy to create something of a hodgepodge of services that end up dragging on a company’s future plans. 

For Bloomberg, KYC doesn’t offer much value as a revenue stream, as the space already contains many players—including Refinitiv, LexisNexis, Dow Jones, Bureau van Dijk and IHS Markit—and it’s often still labor intensive, even after technology has been applied. 

And as for the sell-side OEMS space, Bloomberg has TOMS, so the value of SSEOMS, as a hardcore equity OEMS platform—and there was a time when that was appealing—is no longer ideal. 

Itiviti sees an opening. They’re hoping that TOMS might not be appropriate for everyone, and they’re happy to nibble around the edges in an attempt to win new business. And they seem to be playing it smart—they’re not publically bad-mouthing Bloomberg in any way, they’re just trying to show that there are other options and that the buy side doesn’t need to be locked in.

Itiviti won’t be the only company looking to create new business off of this event. It makes sense. The challenge will be in the execution of the plan. For that, we’ll have to check back in about a year.