In their 2025 Investment Management Outlook, Deloitte underscores the transformative impact artificial intelligence (AI) will have on investment firms' operations. Their research predicts that AI will not only revolutionize decision-making processes but also enhance efficiency across the investment landscape.
Yet, for many firms, the rise of AI introduces a critical challenge: how can they fully harness AI's potential when their existing technology ecosystems are fragmented and outdated?
To unlock AI, investment firms must first lay a solid technological foundation—one capable of addressing today’s complexities, such as the rapid expansion of asset classes, while positioning them to capitalize on AI-driven advancements.
How the OEMS Tackles Today’s Market Challenges and Prepares Investment Firms for the Opportunities of AI
Building a solid technological foundation begins with adopting a modern Order Execution Management System (OEMS).
Now that electronification has expanded far beyond equities, the demand for solutions that enhance front-office efficiency and mitigate risk has grown. A unified OEMS plays a critical role by delivering consistent, straight-through processing workflows across all asset classes while helping firms to holistically manage compliance and adapt to evolving regulatory requirements and investor expectations.
In addition, the advanced connectivity offered by an OEMS provides the groundwork for realizing AI’s full potential. By enabling seamless data flow, comprehensive analysis, and the integration of AI-driven tools, the modern OEMS equips investment firms to become more agile, client-centric and competitive in an increasingly technology-driven financial landscape.
The 5 OEMS Features Investment Firms Need to Scale Artificial Intelligence Application
To prepare firms to leverage AI-driven tools to their fullest potential, an OEMS must have 5 essential features:
Customizable Workflows: Creating an Investment Ecosystem
As markets continue to evolve rapidly and firms expand their strategies and asset offerings, they need solutions that can be quickly customized to meet their unique operational needs.
A modern OEMS platform not only unifies operations but also offers flexibility in creating a dynamic investment ecosystem. This ecosystem allows new tools from existing and emerging providers to be easily integrated and implemented.
This cohesive ecosystem's interoperability is underpinned by robust API connectivity, which supports the seamless integration of future AI tools that can empower firms with tailored insights and decision-support capabilities that can drive more informed, strategic action.
Support for Evolving Compliance and Risk Management Requirements
Increasing compliance requirements and investor mandates have made risk and compliance a growing challenge for investment firms.
At the same time, expansion into complex markets like fixed income and derivatives has heightened the risks posed by manual processes and fragmented systems, making operational efficiency more critical than ever.
These challenges underscore the need for seamless, automated solutions like a unified OEMS. By integrating operations across all asset classes and strategies, an OEMS enhances risk management throughout the trade lifecycle while streamlining workflows for trading desks.
Beyond immediate efficiency gains, the data integrity, operational efficiency and risk management capabilities of the OEMS lay the foundation for future AI capabilities. These AI-powered solutions will be able to cope with increasing compliance and risk management complexities faster and more reliably than human intervention.
Centralized Data and Analytics for Actionable Insights
In today’s data-intensive investment environment, success often hinges on accessing, consolidating and acting on high-quality information.
A robust OEMS serves as the backbone of this process, integrating data from disparate sources such as market feeds, research tools and trading systems to create a centralized, single source of truth. This unified view empowers firms to enhance operational efficiency and make informed, data-driven decisions across all asset classes and strategies.
Next-generation OEMSs go further by transforming this centralized data into actionable insights. The OEMS enables traders and investment managers to synthesize vast amounts of information quickly and effectively by presenting real-time portfolio and market data in configurable, user-friendly formats. This ensures that the right data is available exactly when needed, supporting faster and more confident decision-making.
With an OEMS that centralizes data and delivers cutting-edge analytics, firms are prepared to leverage AI-powered innovations like predictive modeling and natural language processing. These AI-powered capabilities thrive on extensive, clean datasets, providing smarter decision-support tools and deeper market intelligence.
Automation that Improves Strategic Initiatives
Automation is critical for improving present-day processes and acting as a stepping-stone to AI adoption.
By automating repetitive tasks such as trade processing, compliance checks, and portfolio rebalancing, the OEMS reduces manual processes, eliminates errors and frees up human resources to focus on strategic activities.
As firms become comfortable with automation, they can quickly scale up to more complex AI-driven solutions, such as automatic staged order creation based on a combination of data, enhanced automated order routing to maximize performance or automated reporting to have information at hand when needed.
Scalable Cloud Infrastructure
Many investment firms cannot afford to – or choose not to – license, deploy and support complicated software implementations and expensive infrastructure. These firms find value in partnering with providers that offer OEMS technologies in the Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) cloud deployment model.
Cloud deployment saves internal resources and provides firms the scalability as they grow. This scalability ensures that firms can handle the increased volume of data and computation as they expand AI usage.
Cloud infrastructure also provides flexibility, enabling firms to deploy AI solutions without being constrained by on-premises hardware limitations. Moreover, cloud platforms facilitate real-time data processing and access, both of which are essential for AI-driven decision-making.
Investment Ecosystem: The Backbone of a Firm's Operation
SS&C’s OEMS provides a solid foundation for a firm’s front office, serving as the backbone of an investment ecosystem. By enabling seamless data flow, holistic analysis and the integration of additional tools, the OEMS empowers firms to be agile, client-focused and competitive in today’s technology-driven market.
Discover how the OEMS can help your firm navigate evolving market trends, shifting investor demands and operational changes today and in the future.
