T Rowe Price, an investment management firm with US$391 billion assets under management, has successfully implemented system vendor Portware's Enterprise trading platform to help manage its global equities business.
The Portware Enterprise execution management system (EMS) has been installed across T Rowe Price's Baltimore, Hong Kong and London offices and was chosen following tests with a number of EMS providers.
According to Clive Williams, global head of equity trading, T Rowe Price, one of the key factors governing his firm's choice of EMS was the ease at which the system could be deployed globally.
“It was important for us to ensure that our trading desks are not using different software, as this can cause inefficiencies,” Williams told theTRADEnews.com. “Having a single, adaptable EMS makes it easier for our broking counterparts to connect with us as well as ensuring there is a degree of commonality between our traders.”
Portware Enterprise sits on the order management system (OMS) previously used by the buy-side firm for managing its trading flow and can be customised to suit T Rowe Price's sector-focused trading approach.
Williams says that the OMS used by T Rowe Price was no longer suited to the firm's trading style and Harrell Smith, head of product strategy at Portware, considers the move away from OMSs for execution purposes to be a growing trend among larger asset management companies.
“OMSs were never designed for trading and are more suited to specific workflow reporting and compliance needs,” said Smith. “While some have incorporated certain trading functionality into their system, the architecture used for these systems dates back to the late 1980s and is very rigid. This makes them ill-suited for trading in today's fragmented liquidity environment, where buy-side firms need to manage relationships with multiple brokers that offer range of trading tools.”
Smith also notes that a firm that trades in multiple jurisdictions with numerous funds requires the means to tightly manage different compliance requirements such as allocation of P&L across client accounts and specific regulatory issues such as restricted broker lists.
Williams added that Portware Enterprise was easily integrated with T Rowe Price's own compliance model. The new EMS is currently used by T Rowe Price for trading equities but can be extended to other asset classes if required.