Sell-Side Technology Awards 2017: Best Alliance or Partnership—Nasdaq & Digital Reasoning

Digital Reasoning’s eComms has been integrated with Nasdaq’s Smarts Surveillance, allowing Smarts to take care of the trade surveillance alerts while eComms provides context to those alerts through a single interface. The combined solution allows analysts and compliance teams insight across communications and trade data to automatically prioritize areas for evaluation and investigations.

“The application of machine intelligence to identify inappropriate activity in digital communications greatly boosts positive predictive values over traditional methods, and it brings a radical new technological approach to the field of behavior analysis,” said Marten den Haring, chief product officer at Digital Reasoning, when the partnership was announced. “By partnering with Nasdaq, we can raise the bar in signal detection across disparate systems and apply deep understanding of context to assess risk, without adding workload to the already burdened surveillance analyst.”

Smarts oversees 47 marketplaces, 13 regulators and over 130 market participants, globally. Its library is stocked with 210 preconfigured alert scenarios spanning different market abuse and trading anomalies. Digital Reasoning’s Synthesys platform, which underpins the firm’s eComms tool, uses natural-language processing (NLP) and machine learning to understand how people communicate by analyzing context, content and relationships within human communications, while semantically revealing concealed insights. It aims to decipher traders’ “code” in order to separate innocuous chatter from illegal concealment, manipulation or collusion. The combination of Smarts’ data and detection capabilities with Synthesys’ underlying NLP and machine-learning technology has allowed users to improve surveillance coverage while cutting down on false positives.

This is the first time this award has been on offer for the Sell-Side Technology Awards. In addition to being named the best market surveillance provider, Nasdaq also took home the prestigious best overall sell-side product of the year trophy.