Sell-Side Technology Awards 2020: Best Reporting Platform or Service for the Sell Side—SteelEye

Being a first mover doesn’t always confer an advantage, says Matt Smith, CEO of compliance platform provider, SteelEye. Bringing a reporting solution to the market once reporting regimes like the European Markets Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) and the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid II) were already in place has allowed the company to work on a data-driven approach that helped it land the category for the best reporting platform or service for the sell side in this year’s SST Awards. SteelEye takes the title from last year’s winner, Kaizen Reporting, which won for the award for its ReportShield solution.

“We were late to the game,” Smith admits. “EMIR was already in force before SteelEye existed. But we were able to start from a point of really understanding the data. When we built our tool, we had the benefit of hindsight, which other market practitioners didn’t. We were able to build a better tool that looked more efficiently at data, and was better set up to qualify datasets.”

Smith says that as the various reporting regimes were finalized, it became apparent that the datasets required for trade and transaction reporting to each one was largely the same. “And they could be used even beyond reporting—these datasets are also required for market abuse detection, trade surveillance, financial crime, trade reconstruction, and so on,” Smith says.

SteelEye realized that if it first got the data points right, that would help it solve regulatory problems for its clients, but also that “the data, which was otherwise dormant and which you have gone through this painful exercise to clean up and normalize in order to report it, would be useful for purposes beyond regulation. That was our starting thesis, and that is something we still believe,” Smith says.

SteelEye offers a standardized, canonical dataset for reporting, as well as trade surveillance, transaction-cost analysis, best execution reporting, communications surveillance, and market abuse detection. The platform ensures that all client data is cleansed, mapped and indexed before it is used within the reporting suite, which automatically generates the transaction reports.