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Geopolitical instability and driven by worldwide tariff conflicts and the continued threat of inflation has led to tremendous amounts of market volatility. Typically, this increase in market uncertainty is good for trading business and not surprisingly, demand for EMS platforms has increased over the past few years. Key trends around cloud migration, multi-asset class capabilities, adoption of AI functionalities and increased workflow integration between EMS and OMS have put additional pressure on EMS providers to deliver more robust and reliable solutions.
This year, buy-side respondents to the survey appear to show some concerns, resulting in a decline in every single EMS performance category. As such, the 2025 edition of The TRADE’ s Execution Management Systems Survey highlights a mixture of feedback from traders and other buy-side respondents regarding their EMS providers over the past year with a survey average of 5.71, representing the largest decline on record since 2014.
Figure 1 shows the scores recorded from buy-side respondents over the past three years across thirteen functional EMS categories. Reliability and availability remained the highest rated category in 2025 with a score of 6.13,-0.24 lower than the previous year. Also scoring above 6.0( very good) were FIX capabilities( 6.03) and breadth of broker algorithms( 6.02). In comparison, product development( 5.18) logged the lowest score in this year’ s survey with steep decline of-0.33. Overall cost of operation( 5.19) represented the largest year-on-year decline
Buy-side satisfaction with EMS platforms declines amid rising market demand
The TRADE’ s 2025 EMS Survey reveals a record drop in satisfaction across all functional categories. While volatility and multi-asset expansion continue to drive adoption, buyside concerns over costs, product development and integration highlight growing pressure on EMS vendors to keep pace.
in ratings at-0.46, clearly highlighting managing costs remains a top issue for most firms as they continue to grapple with globalisation and expansion into multi-asset classes. A couple of other areas of concern are ease of integration of internal systems and client service personnel, which showed declines of-0.3 and-0.29 respectively.
While all categories experienced decreases to their scores in this year’ s survey, the smallest decreases were in breadth of broker algorithms(-0.03), ease of use(-0.10), timeliness of updates for broker algorithms(-0.11) and breadth of asset class coverage(-0.12), illustrating that the buy-
62 // TheTRADE // Q3 2025