Competing in today’s dynamic markets with faster, smarter execution analytics: How a leading $1.5 Trillion AUM asset management firm leveraged BMLL data to optimize TCA workflows

By Tom Jardine, Head of Data Science (Americas), BMLL

As someone who has worked closely with asset managers at BMLL and at previous roles, I have seen firsthand the growing pressure to deliver better execution outcomes while managing tighter budgets and meeting rising regulatory expectations. As a result, post-trade analytics such as Transaction Cost Analysis (TCA), broker performance benchmarking, and liquidity profiling have become essential for reducing trading costs, improving execution quality, and ensuring regulatory compliance.

Why traditional in-house builds and third-party solutions often fall short for asset managers

Historically, firms have taken one of two routes to access post-trade analytics.

  • In-house builds: The first is to build the solution in-house. This method offers flexibility and control, allowing execution teams to tailor their analytics to specific needs. However, developing and maintaining the infrastructure to capture, cleanse, and normalize high-quality market data is both time- and resource-intensive. The technical complexity and operational overhead often limit the benefits, especially considering the infrastructure and labor requirements involved.

  • Third-party solutions: The alternative is to outsource analytics creation to traditional third-party providers. While this typically reduces direct operational cost and effort, it has drawbacks. These solutions often act as "black boxes," relying on rigid, predefined methodologies that offer little transparency or flexibility. Customization is limited, and firms are left without the required control or visibility.

Neither model adequately serves its purpose in today’s complex, fragmented, and fast-moving markets. To remain competitive and data-driven, forward-thinking asset managers now seek a third path: a modern solution that delivers flexibility and transparency without the overhead of building from scratch or compromising visibility.

The shift towards scalable, flexible and transparent analytics infrastructure

Increasingly, asset managers are selecting vendors that provide scalable infrastructure and fully transparent workflows. The key requirements are clear:

  • high-quality, normalized datasets that remove the need for manual cleaning;

  • seamless integration with cloud ecosystems like Snowflake or Databricks;

  • flexibility to build custom analytics on top of robust foundations;

  • user-friendly environments that make insights accessible to both technical and non-technical teams.

BMLL combines rich historical market data with cloud-native applications and expert quantitative support. This modern infrastructure allows firms to streamline operations, scale analytics faster, and reduce their total cost of ownership, all while improving the quality and speed of insight generation.

BMLL enables asset managers to optimize execution analytics and trading outcomes

At the core of BMLL’s offering is the BMLL Data Feed: a comprehensive, fully normalized suite of T+1 Level 1, 2, and 3 datasets and analytics covering over 100 global equity, ETF, futures, and US equity options venues. These datasets provide the depth and detail required for sophisticated execution analysis and modelling. Data is delivered through multiple mechanisms, including cloud-based research environments that support analytics generation and workflow automation at scale.

Crucially, BMLL also provides dedicated onboarding and quant support, helping clients prototype and productionize custom analytics rapidly. This combination of high-quality data, flexible delivery, and specialist guidance enables asset managers to replace outdated tools and fragmented workflows with a reliable, global, scalable analytics infrastructure. This means asset managers can focus their efforts on generating execution insights, without compromise, ultimately accelerating the path to better trading outcomes.

A leading asset manager partnered with BMLL to streamline its global TCA framework.

This approach is already transforming execution workflows and delivering impact for clients. A leading asset management firm with an equity portfolio of over $1.5 trillion in AUM recently partnered with BMLL to overhaul its global TCA framework. The firm’s global execution team was responsible for driving an initiative to leverage new datasets and technologies to enhance trading performance and minimize market impact.

With the support of BMLL’s Customer Data Science Team, the firm integrated its trade data seamlessly with BMLL’s global market data model. Daily TCA and broker analytics reports were generated automatically, with minimal manual intervention, and the new workflow was deployed entirely within the firm’s Snowflake environment, ensuring full control, data governance, and security.

The transformation was significant. In less than three months, and using minimal resources, the firm successfully replaced its legacy post-trade analytics system. They gained the following benefits:

  • time spent managing historical data dropped by 95 percent.

  • report generation, previously a time-consuming task that spanned multiple days, now takes three to five minutes.

  • execution insights are now available across all teams globally.

  • eliminated much of the dependency on legacy vendors and tools.

By adopting a transparent, scalable solution, such as BMLL, asset managers improve the precision and speed of their post-trade analysis, reduce operational complexity, unlock cost savings, and empower their teams to deliver more value from their data.