ReformIS were asked to provide business analysis resources and specialist product knowledge to deliver the pilot solution for a global Order Management System (OMS), using a market leading vendor product.

The project was initiated as part of a global IT application review.  It was envisaged that the project solution would enable our client to deliver a modern, industry leading platform for consistent deployment of OMS functionality around its offices worldwide.  The initiative also had backing from the main global business areas; where the Global Equity group and the Global Fixed Income Risk Management Steering Committee had identified a requirement for a global trading platform as a core part of their long-term strategy. There was also pressure from a recent draft audit report that recommended that our client upgrade its compliance monitoring to a consistent standard globally.

The proposed global OMS Suite covered four major areas of functionality:

• Order generation
• Order management
• Pre and post trade compliance
• Support of the post-execution, trade notification and settlement processes

An early project decision was made to use a pilot implementation of the OMS solution in London as the starting point for a wider future global rollout.  The pilot deployed the fully integrated suite of OMS product components, including; manager workbench, compliance engine and trading blotter, plus post-trade processing functionality. The client’s Enterprise Data Management solution, Golden Source, provided reference data, and portfolio positions were supplied via an in-house corporate trading system and Positions and Benchmark repository.

The objectives of the Pilot were to:

• Establish compliance and client guideline rules to support pre-trade guideline checks
• Identify and validate business requirements in respect of Order Management and Dealing

• Define and implement all required supporting interfaces to and from the OMS and other upstream or downstream applications in order to support required data and transaction flows

• Evaluate the potential to retire existing applications, hardware and licenses supporting the existing OMS landscape
• Evaluate the potential to rationalise processes and re-deploy personnel
• Develop optimised business processes to fully leverage the full suite of functionality within the OMS product

• Deploy a market leading OMS application, allowing  business resources to focus on adding value and devote more time to monitoring markets and best execution

• Allow Compliance to create and deploy more complex compliance rules to satisfy increasing client and complex security demands

• Provide further automation of the post execution process, an ability to provide for an exception driven process, and flexibility to utilise multiple confirmation systems

• Reduce cycle times for order creation, transmission, execution, allocation, exception detection and error correction