CASE STUDY
Primary markets electronic trading: A transformative step forward

Irish Life Investment Managers
Irish Life Investment Managers (ILIM), the appointed asset manager for the Irish Life Group, is one of the largest managers of life assurance and pension assets in Ireland. It oversees €31 billion in fixed income assets across government, emerging market, investment grade and high-yield securities. The Irish Life Group services more than 1.6 million people — one in every three adults in Ireland — and partners with the country’s 10 largest domestic companies and 28 of the 30 largest multinational employers.
FEATURED PRODUCTS
INDUSTRY
Investment Management
LOCATION
Dublin, Ireland
GOAL
Eliminate fragmented, manual workflows and administrative tasks, while enabling straight-through trade processing
Key insights
With an electronic, data-rich workflow in place, Irish Life can scale new-issue activity without additional headcount, while maintaining its trusted technology stack.
Bloomberg’s TSOX and FIX solutions streamline Irish Life’s participation in the primary bond markets, cutting manual effort by over 80 percent and eliminating risks inherent in antiquated manual processes.
Electronic workflow is proving essential to productivity, operational efficiency and ultimately performance.
Diarmuid O’Keeffe
Senior Trader, Irish Life Investment Managers
Situation
As Irish Life scaled into a top-tier participant in the primary bond markets, it encountered the industry-wide limitations of the legacy new-issue process.
Fragmented manual workflows that were disconnected from existing risk and compliance systems
Hours of administrative effort was consumed managing chats, emails and voice to communicate orders and receive allocations
Problem
The process lacked straight-through processing that institutions have come to rely on in secondary market trading.
Resulted in operational risks and delayed trade processing and lags in position updates
Created an unsustainable, high-risk burden on a small team of traders, portfolio managers and operational specialists
Solution
Bloomberg’s Fixed Income EMS (TSOX), a new innovative integrated workflow for the primary market, gave Irish Life a way to bring structure and straight-through processing to one of the last remaining manual corners of fixed income trading.
Once a new issue is set up in the OMS, orders can be electronically staged to TSOX after passing through the same OMS pre-trade risk and compliance checks Irish Life uses for their secondary market trading.
TSOX can route the order directly to where the dealer syndicate is building the book, creating a seamless electronic link between Irish Life’s OMS, TSOX, and the syndicate.
Allocation awards are returned electronically from the syndicate back through TSOX and booked straight into the OMS — eliminating spreadsheet tracking, rekeying trades into the OMS, next-day position updates and risk and compliance checks.
The result is a fully integrated, auditable workflow that reduces operational risks, enhances real-time position management, and restores control to the trading and operations teams.
The migration began in early 2024. After minor configuration in security master setup, primary market trades now pass straight through, giving traders confidence to rely on the automated process.
The streamlined workflow frees the desk to focus on alpha-generating activities, reduces operational risk and ensures compliance screening happens in real time rather than T+1.
Diarmuid O’Keeffe
Senior Trader, Irish Life Investment Managers
BENEFITS
weekly manual processing time (down from 4 hours)
daily deals booked automatically (up from 0)
trade rejection rate
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