Waters Rankings 2017: Best Market Surveillance System Provider—Nasdaq

Smarts allows firms to proactively monitor market manipulation—including spoofing and layering—detect and deter manipulative tendencies, gather intelligence, carry out trader monitoring and analysis, conduct multi-asset and cross-market surveillance, and execute risk-based supervision of flagged participants. It gathers information via direct feeds from trading venues and provides visualizations and alerts to make that sea of information more easily understandable via a readable snapshot. This has become crucial, as regulators across the globe are digging deeper into market abuse cases, while folding in new regulatory requirements around surveillance. 

Smarts has two decades of capital markets experience and as such, it is currently used to monitor almost 50 marketplaces globally, and it is used by 17 regulators and 140 market participants in 65 countries. 

Nasdaq has been busy this year adding to its stable of companies using the Smarts platform. The Nigerian Stock Exchange is using Smarts to power its new market surveillance platform, as is the Shanghai Futures Exchange and the Tokyo Commodity Exchange. The Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC) also signed on to use the platform for market surveillance. NEX Group will use it to monitor its FX and fixed-income trading venues—run through its subsidiary EBS BrokerTec—to monitor for and seek out instances of fraud and market abuse. BM&FBovespa has extended its agreement with Nasdaq to cover equities, commodities and futures markets, and SIX Swiss Exchange extended its contract and is using Smarts to underpin surveillance of its dark pool, SIX Swiss Exchange At Midpoint (SwissAtMid).  

Nasdaq has been busy piling up the hardware over the last 12 months, underling its status as the premier provider of market surveillance technology and services to the capital markets. At this year’s Sell-Side Technology Awards held in April, it took home three trophies—best alliance or partnership, best overall sell-side product of the year, and best sell-side market surveillance product—while at the Inside Market Data/Inside Reference Data Awards, it won for best low-latency data/technology provider category. Late last year at the Buy-Side Technology Awards in London, it won the best market surveillance platform category and in this year’s Operational Risk Awards, it also took home the best market surveillance product gong, illustrating its impressive consistency and versatility across markets. That’s a lot of winning with no end in sight.