Sell-Side Technology Awards 2017: Best Overall Sell-Side Product of the Year—Nasdaq

All the winners of the preceding 28 categories making up this year’s SST Awards line-up were considered for this award, but it was Nasdaq, with its compelling Smarts Trade Surveillance platform and its recent alliance with Digital Reasoning, that landed the penultimate category of the 2017 SST Awards. 

As has come to be the case over the last four years in these awards—and in the annual Buy-Side Technology Awards—the New York-based market operator and technology firm was adjudged as possessing the industry’s must-have market surveillance platform, thanks to its Smarts Trade Surveillance offering, designed “to automate the detection, investigation and analysis of potentially abusive or disorderly trading to help improve the overall efficiency of the surveillance organization and reduce cost.” 

Nasdaq’s second visit to this year’s winners’ circle was a collaborative effort with New York-based artificial intelligence (AI) specialist Digital Reasoning, which won an individual category of its own: the best artificial intelligence technology award, the first year the category has been on offer. In February last year, Nasdaq and Digital Reasoning came together in an alliance with the view to providing sell-side firms with a market-monitoring service with a difference: The platform would not only monitor markets and their participants, but it would also add AI technology to the mix and by so doing provide user-firms with the ability to identify inappropriate activity through digital communications and “understand the context of that monitoring,” according to Marten den Haring, chief product officer at Digital Reasoning. The collaborating saw Nasdaq’s Trade Surveillance platform merged with Digital Reasoning’s eComms offering, resulting in arguably the industry’s best market surveillance platform becoming a lot more intelligent, allowing analysts and compliance teams insight across communications and trade data to automatically prioritize areas for evaluation and investigation.

A number of other technology firms came into the final reckoning for this award, but it was Nasdaq’s two individual category wins, combined with its eagerness to continually push the boundaries of market surveillance, that ultimately proved decisive. Past winners of this category include Numerix (2013), GoldenSource (2014), Quartet FS (2015) and R3 (2016).