National Bank of Bahrain adopts Bloomberg solutions to streamline trading and risk management

NBB is the first G.C.C.-based bank to adopt the integrated suite

The National Bank of Bahrain (NBB) is the first G.C.C.-based bank to adopt Bloomberg’s comprehensive and integrated trade order management and risk management solutions. Bloomberg’s Trade Order Management System (TOMS) and Multi-Asset Risk System (MARS) solutions allow banks to manage orders and risk and ensure data consistency in real-time across the front and middle offices, all from a single solution. 

Risk practitioners and regulators alike have been stressing the need to break down silos between front and middle office risk, end-of-day and intraday risk data and modelling, for over a decade. With firms often using different front office solutions for different asset classes, reconciliation with risk models is even more complex. Bloomberg’s TOMS and MARS integration helps banks solve for these challenges and realise efficiencies, by synchronizing front-office trading with middle-office risk management, operations and enterprise applications in real-time.

Jaffar Hussain, Head of Liquidity and Market Risk at at the National Bank of Bahrain, said: “At NBB, automation is one of our highest priorities, as is continuously improving our risk controls in line with global best practice. The suite of Bloomberg tools we’ve adopted has not only supported us in achieving this, but we’ve increased efficiencies, ultimately allowing us to better focus our efforts and resources into what matters to our customers.” 

Phil McCabe, Global Head of Sell-side solutions at Bloomberg L.P. said: “To be competitive, traders need real-time access to correct trading and risk data, and portfolio representations. The combination of Bloomberg’s TOMS and MARS allows traders and sales to immediately assess the real impact of a trade on the risk profile of the bank’s books or the client’s portfolios, running the same calculations used by the risk management team. This allows banks to make better informed decisions more systematically, reduce risks and improve execution for clients.”

Benjamin Grolimund, Regional Manager, Middle East & Africa – Financial Products, Bloomberg L.P.: “We are pleased that NBB has chosen Bloomberg as a technology partner in a number of key areas. Our trading and risk solutions are used by professionals across the globe to analyze their trading and investment portfolios, manage and mitigate their exposure and ready themselves for any turn of events, something we’ve seen key players in the Middle East, such as NBB, show increased interest in.”

In 2020 and 2019, Bloomberg’s TOMS and MARS integration won the Waters Technology Award for Best Sell-Side Front-Office Platform. Bloomberg also won the Risk Markets Technology Award for “Pricing and analytics: structured products and cross-asset” and the Chartis RiskTech100 Award for “Pricing & Analytics – Fixed Income” and “Pricing & Analytics – Multi-asset” in 2019. According to the judges for the Risk Award: “The extensive integrated end-to-end framework for structured product and cross-asset pricing, with a choice of proprietary Bloomberg applications or in-house add-ons, make this a powerful tool.” 

MARS is a comprehensive suite of risk management tools that delivers consistent, consolidated results across entire firms, powered by Bloomberg’s widely adopted pricing library, market and reference data and mortgage cash flow engine. TOMS provides sell-side firms with electronic trading tools, market connectivity and solutions to efficiently manage inventory, risk, P&L, compliance and straight-through processing for fixed income and derivative products.