Sell-Side Technology Awards 2017: Best Sell-Side Market Surveillance Product—Nasdaq

Sell-Side Market Surveillance Product - Nasdaq

Nasdaq is one of the oldest vendors in the market, having worked in the surveillance space for the past 22 years. Smarts, the New York-based exchange operator’s flagship surveillance offering, is a multi-asset, software-as-a-service (Saas)-based platform that covers 45 marketplaces, 16 regulators and serves 137 market participants spanning 139 venues, globally. This year has seen a number of enhancements made to the platform, partly as a result of Europe’s new Market Abuse Regulation (MAR). For example, in 2016, Nasdaq started training user-firms on a combination of new alerts for order book manipulation, while more recently, its focus has shifted to layering and spoofing, which it has addressed by way of a new visualization tool that monitors how people behave in an order book and how that behavior relates to the overall market direction. 

A graph comprising all this information, which also includes past investigations on relevant cases, allows users to understand in seconds whether there is or was manipulative behavior in an order book. The tool has more than 210 preconfigured alert scenarios, and it also includes targeted regional alerts designed for each market. 

Smarts has also adopted a new perspective on orders and trades where its clients are able to monitor each trader in order to understand their trading patterns over time and the number of alerts they might have received, allowing them to compare traders’ profitability against their peers, with the view to detecting possible suspicious performances. 

These changes reflect Nasdaq’s conviction that the recipe for success boils down to two factors: staying ahead of market developments and pursuing technical innovation. 

Valerie Bannert-Thurner, senior vice president and global head of Nasdaq’a risk and surveillance business, says that these factors are critical if a firm wants to provide high-quality services. “We try to be ahead of the curve for our customers,” she says. “For example, the fixed-income market is moving from over-the-counter (OTC) to on-exchange trading; before customers realize what’s happening, we tell them we have a surveillance platform for that.” Bannert-Thurner adds that innovation is high on the firm’s agenda. “We try to get lots of new and good products,” she says. “With every new feature we release we take a step toward new technologies.” 

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