The Finance Hive

Closed-door, open minds.

Pollen Group Partner Feedback 

Insights on our recommended partners have been generated by peer-2-peer discussion among Finance Hive Buy side Members over email and in breakout groups at our recent Finance Hive meetings.

Below is the selection of feedback that we are receiving and what will be available for you as our Buy Side Members, to view, comment on, discuss when out platform is fully live.

What we like:

  • It’s really good in terms of transparency
  • You can click and it will show you where you are more or less aggressive which is useful.
  • Useful for multi-asset TCA – specifically in FX
  • It’s good you can see implied costs in BTCA
  • It’s great that you can join up pre-trade and post-trade
  • The 2.0 version is a good upgrade and very stable.
  • There is very rarely any down time or too many technical glitches, so the solution offers reliability and security
  • Broker connectivity is good. It makes managing broker relationships easier as everyone is connected to Bloomberg
  • The workflow element is good enough for basic order requirements
  • There is good workflow connectivity and integration with other Bloomberg products both on the trading desk, and across departments
  • We like the way you can sort and filter which were enabled in the last update some years ago.
  • You have access to most information, though it seems that we should consider to implement some further analytics on our side.
  • It was a great step forward – it’s a cleaner design and the flexibility of the views is much greater.  E.g. having one VWAP performance column, with all the options underneath it, is much better than having all different various set as distinct columns.

What we’d like to see changed:

  • There are quite a few windows I use for my pre-trade that aren’t in the TCA. We can have a few tickets open.
  • They need to invest some time into aggregating the data to PDF reports for meeting with brokers
  • It can be hard to customise on your own if you can’t code in python
  • It would be good to see charges on block trades in more detail
  • I’d also like to add that editing trades (due to re-booking, changing tags, etc.) on any date after T is difficult in BTCA
  • When sending orders to conditional venues, the total order has to be sent which isn’t great…. Or is there a way?  Manually having to remove orders from conditionals or they are sent out the following day is incorrect.
  • ID markets are not supported correctly – Omnibus market accounts are split when sent to trading.
  • Enhancement requests. Do they ever happen? Word is no!!  Unfortunately we have a number of them..
  • Inability to merge trades for different accounts if one is in the market without incurring costs / one account is put on hold and then restarted (in a multiple account order), costs incurred.
  • Allocation blotter.. no breakdown of cash available
  • Sector deviation column .. computer says no
  • It takes way too long to make enhancements or even fix bugs, in my world, with the implementation of the 2.0.
  • A simple thing they broke with the new version, that we really should not spend time on, is the resizing of the blotters in EMSX. It should really be very simple to allow horizontal resize of the windows below. Peers will use technology that can size the window and overlap if you like. Further the Navigator view showing baskets amongst other things cannot be zoomed out all the other views can.
  • In the old version you could resize the blotters, with the 2.0 version you cannot. They are fixed like this and not very user friendly:
  • It would be great to be able to create custom columns.
  • Issues we have is primarily that we are unable to select brokers in our portfolio system, without having to have induvial fix connections set up against the various brokers at a high cost.
  • A problem for us with this is that we do not get a warning if we have to much exposure against a broker. It would be ideal if you could group brokers (e.g. cash broker and pt broker together) and set a line towards them where you are warned if value exceeds the limit you have in place.
  • We have a broker in Asia (India) that have difficulties receiving trades in a certain time slot, why we have to wait to quite late to send the trade.

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