The sellside trade and order surveillance technology solutions landscape in 2018 is evolving rapidly. The twin drivers of change in surveillance needs and behaviour are regulations – specifically, the second iteration of the EU’s Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) and the Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) and the US Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act – and competition between banks for market share are pushing investment banks to establish more comprehensive, ‘all-seeing’ – or holistic – trade surveillance solutions. These solutions are considered holistic because they incorporate both structured trade and order data, as well as unstructured contextualising information such as e-mails and recorded phone calls, to detect and prevent breaches of compliance and internal limits, which ultimately enable banks to avoid reputation-damaging transgressions that lead to fines and a consequential loss of business for the bank.
Historically, structured and unstructured data were analysed separately, utilising separate systems because the technology to handle both was unavailable. In 2018, however, vendors are beginning to use these and other toolkits to integrate the ingestion, processing and analysis of unstructured and structured data on a single platform, such that they can analyse trends and patterns across both types of data.
The report examines how surveillance technology solutions are functionally designed to help banks address the challenge of carrying out the more comprehensive surveillance monitoring and analysis that EU and US regulators expect in 2018.