BST Awards 2020: Best buy-side compliance product, trading—Verint

As the Covid-19 pandemic forced employees out of their high-rises and into their homes, the question of how to conduct trade surveillance and monitor compliance suddenly became uncharted territory for the buy side. For the technology vendors out there, this change was reflected in which products clients have most gravitated toward. This year’s winner, Verint—which won the category last year—has seen heightened demand for compliance-related capture and monitoring of video calls and conferencing. 

“The coronavirus pandemic has been a real catalyst for digital transformation for the buy side and sell side alike, and the biggest challenge is delivering compliant capabilities wherever and however users communicate in the work-from-anywhere era,” says Philip Fry, vice president of financial compliance product strategy at Verint. 

Over the past year the Long Island, NY-based vendor has inked a number of major partnerships. In May, it announced a collaboration with Microsoft Teams to allow the capture, retention, analysis, and retrieval of communications from calls and meetings, including voice calling, chat, online meetings, and screen sharing. 

Fry says the new norm is moving firms to embrace the notion of “compliance everywhere.” The firm has been actively engaging with mobile connectivity providers such as Truphone, mobile compliance specialists such as TeleMessage, and cloud-based trader voice vendors like Cloud9. 

“In the case of Cloud9, we jointly developed an advanced integration for compliance recording, data governance, and analysis of trade-related interactions occurring on the trading floor and in home-office environments, enabling compliance for remote trading workflows,” Fry says.  

The firm’s compliance offering targets asset managers as well as private wealth, pension and hedge funds.

Looking ahead, Fry says the next milestones on Verint’s roadmap will be creating partnerships with other regtech providers, aligning communications and transactional activity for trade monitoring, and proactively monitoring communications for potential risks and policy violation.