ABP Investments, the world’s second largest pension fund and the Netherlands’ biggest, has gone live on Omgeo Central Trade Manager (CTM).
ABP's link to the cross-border trade matching utility has been achieved through an direct interface from its Bloomberg Portfolio Order Management System (Poms). The link enables ABP to send trade allocations directly to its broker/dealers and automatically generates affirmations for matched trades via the FIX protocol from the Bloomberg Professional service.
The tie-up with Bloomberg is providing a beachhead into the European pensions market for Omgeo, a joint venture operation of Thomson Financial and the DTCC which has traditionally been stronger in the US domestic markets.
Dave Pember, director, partners program Emea, Omgeo comments: "The structure of the pension fund industry in countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden, enables funds to link directly to Omgeo CTM through Bloomberg Poms...We hope to be able to announce further examples of this in the coming months."
René van Dam, senior business consultant, ABP Investments says the link to Omgeo improves automation of matching and settlement instructions. "This makes the process not only more efficient, but also improves the quality of ABP’s investment data. This is accomplished without us spending our resources on all sorts of connectivity issues."