About
PBW Professional Services was founded on a simple premise: buy-side firms making major OMS decisions deserve an advisor who has implemented both leading platforms — and can tell them which one fits their business without a conflict of interest.
PBW Professional Services LLC is a boutique consulting firm specializing in trading infrastructure for asset managers. The firm focuses exclusively on Bloomberg Asset and Investment Manager (AIM) and Charles River Investment Management System (IMS) — the two platforms that now dominate the buy-side OMS/EMS landscape.
The firm was built around a staffing model that the large consulting firms cannot match: the expert who scopes an engagement is the expert who delivers it. There are no junior analysts building configurations from a template while the senior consultant fields the next sales call. When you engage PBW, you are engaging the person with the platform knowledge, and that person is present throughout the project.
Platform experience on both sides of the market is the credibility foundation that makes the firm's advice different. Most OMS consultants built their practice on one platform — Bloomberg because they came from Bloomberg, or Charles River because their first firm ran CRD. That history shapes the advice they give, sometimes invisibly. When a client asks "which platform should we choose," a consultant with deep experience on only one platform has a conflict, even if they do not acknowledge it.
The PBW approach starts with requirements: your asset classes, trading workflows, compliance structure, existing technology stack, and operational capacity. Those requirements drive the platform recommendation, not the other way around. For firms already committed to a platform, the same requirements-first discipline drives the implementation design.
UCLA Anderson MBA provides the financial and organizational rigor that separates technology implementation from business transformation. An OMS deployment is not just a systems project — it changes how your trading desk operates, what your compliance team can monitor, and what your operations team does on any given day. The business implications get as much attention as the technical ones.
The clients PBW works with tend to be small-to-mid-size asset managers: firms large enough to require institutional-grade infrastructure but not large enough to absorb the overhead of a tier-one consulting engagement. These firms often face a choice between a large consultancy that will staff the project with junior resources and a boutique that knows one platform but not the other. PBW was built for the space between those options.
The firm does not take referral relationships with Bloomberg or Charles River that would create a recommendation bias. Engagements are priced to the work, not to the size of the platform license. The right answer for a given firm is the right answer — not the answer that generates the largest follow-on contract.