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Charles River
W
hile the shockwaves of State Street paying out
$2.6 billion to acquire Charles River in July last
year have long since disappeared, the initial reaction
among the asset management community was one of
positivity, if the discussions at last year’s InvestOps
conference in London could be used as a reliable
yardstick. Since then, State Street has been hard at
work integrating the vendor’s various solutions into its
front-to-back offering, and the buy-side will be keep-
ing a keen eye on how this impacts on their front-of-
fice execution capabilities.
In this year’s survey Charles River saw a 42% de-
crease in the number of responses from buy-side firms
compared to the 2018 edition, and was the lowest
ranked profiled provider based purely on response
numbers. Last year Charles River recorded the lowest
average score of profiled providers (4.83) and the
vendor has the unwanted position at the bottom of the
rankings again this year, with an average score of 5.08
(well below the survey average of 5.78), despite this
representing a year-on-year increase of 0.25.
Charles River’s highest score in this year’s survey
was in the reliability and availability category (5.95),
although this again was the lowest score amongst
profiled providers, it also scored respectably in the
latency (5.62) and FIX capabilities categories (5.80).
The vendor also recorded year-on-year score increases
in nine of the 13 functional categories under review,
most notably for its latency capabilities (+1.17), while
it also saw a good improvement within the reliability
and availability (+0.81) and handling of new versions/
releases (+0.67) categories.
However, Charles River also saw some decreased
scores compared to last year, with year-on-year falls
in the breadth of broker algorithms (-0.29), breadth
of direct connections to venues (-0.24) and breadth of
asset class coverage (-0.17) categories. These were also
among the seven categories in which Charles River re-
ceived the lowest score of this year’s profiled providers
– alongside client service personnel (4.59), handling of
new versions/releases (4.80), timeliness of updates for
broker changes (4.84), and overall cost of operations
(4.48) – implying that buy-side respondents find the
Charles River EMS far too narrow in market scope.
CHARLES RIVER RATINGS FOR EMS PERFORMANCE
Reliability and
Availability Latency Client Service
Personnel Ease-of-
Use Handling of New
Versions/Releases Breadth of Broker
Algorithms Timeliness of Updates
for Broker Changes FIX Capabilities
5.95 5.62 4.59 5.01 4.80 4.97 4.84 5.80
Breadth of Asset Class
Coverage Breadth of Direct
Connections to Venues Product
Development Ease of Integration to
Internal Systems Overall Cost of Operation Average score
5.09 5.03 4.73 5.08 4.48 5.08
KEY STATS
+1.17 5.95 4.48 73%
Best year-on-year score
(latency) Highest score
(reliability and
availability) Lowest score
(overall cost of
operation) Most important EMS
feature: Ease of integration
to internal systems
Issue 61 // TheTradeNews.com // 87