Welcome back, everyone. The weather’s finally warming up, and our development team is firing on all cylinders. We’ve tackled a number of initiatives on our roadmap in Q1, advancing the capabilities across Eze Investment Suite to more effectively address your business needs. Here are some highlights, by functional area:
Trade Execution & Analytics
Q1 was a big quarter for the Execution Management System (EMS), with MiFID II functionality as the central theme. As you’ve probably heard by now, we’ve partnered with OTAS Analytics to integrate advanced, responsive analytics into the EMS blotter to help firms meet best execution requirements under MiFID II. This was an important addition to our TCA capabilities, which will be critical for clients in MiFID II compliance. (P.S. In the next few weeks, look out for a guest post from OTAS on how requirements in the space are changing and what you can do about it.)
We’ve also continued to bolster our access to alternative liquidity sources from the EMS. For instance, we’ve added the block trading BIDS crossing network to our list of routing destinations, and are in the process of onboarding ITG’s POSIT. This is especially relevant in light of increasing block volume, and MiFID II paving the path for even more liquidity to go to alternative trading systems.
Order Management
In March, we released the first iteration of an improved ability to import trades captured in Excel format into the OMS. The new Trade Importer feature is a workroom component that provides robust data validation, streamlined allocation processing, and fully integrated pre-trade compliance and position checking to allow you to quickly get a large set of trades into the OMS and out for execution. Based on your feedback, we particularly focused on improving performance, and streamlined drag-and-drop workflows for loading your Excel worksheets into the OMS.
As we continue to foster a development process where we release increments of fully usable capabilities, we are pleased to have some of you already using this new tool, and providing us timely feedback that we are incorporating into our upcoming releases. We truly believe in the positive impact of such close collaboration between our Research & Development team and our users, and look forward to working closely with all of you for all of our development in the future!
Portfolio Accounting
In January, Eze Portfolio Accounting made a number of reporting improvements, as well as event-based task scheduling, and better navigation within Reconciliation.
We’ve also improved the Reconciliation Summary dashboard -- the tool that shows you a daily summary of reconciliation status by broker and fund, an at-a-glance view of unreconciled cash balances by broker and currency, and the ability to sort data. You can now see all of your reconciled and unreconciled positions by fund and custody account, and filter by fund and currency. You can also see all closing cash balance differences, grouped by cash account and currency, including records with breaks and any mapping issues. You can auto generate missing trades without having to swivel between screens.
Within reporting, the security and return calculations now include short positions, and the NAV exposure reports now include cross currency securities. We also improved swap financing tracking and corporate actions reporting.
We also added the IDC Remote Plus data feed. You can now download global financial data for pricing for all security types, benchmark yield downloads and corporate actions. The Bloomberg Data License: Master data has been enhanced to support the Delayed response type for security downloads.
Finally, for those of you who are using more than one application within Investment Suite, there’s now a way to monitor the status of your internal operations. This means you’ll be able to detect and resolve any communications issues faster and easier.
Across Investment Suite, we’ve been making a big quality push. We’re making great progress there, and are rapidly approaching the point at which we’ll have virtually no defect backlog against our more recently released products. This has already resulted in positive commentary from clients, and provides another good reason to upgrade to the latest versions of the products you use.
We also continue to make great progress with Eze Investment Cloud, our cloud-native offering. Stay tuned for more updates on that front; things will be heating up! And speaking of warm, please join us in sunny Orlando for our Eze Advance conference, where we’ll be talking trends and best practices, running hands-on product workshops, and mingling Oct. 25-27.
Until then, please subscribe for regular updates.
To learn about Eze Software's award winning investment suite, please visit our applications page.
