AFTAs 2020: Best Partnership or Alliance—Verint & Cloud9

In 2020, Verint, a provider of security and intelligence data mining software, and Cloud9, a voice communication and analytics platform, joined forces. The partnership serves to provide a cloud-enabled communications solution to support traders who are now working remotely as well as on the trading floor. 

Cloud9 and Verint’s joint offering encompasses Cloud9’s C9 Trader voice communication platform and Verint Financial Compliance Capture to provide financial institutions with a communication and compliance framework. Investment firms, asset managers, and broker-dealers can use features like “search and playback” and “case management” to keep records of trades and supply information for monitoring and compliance with regulations like Mifid II, Market Abuse Regulation (MAR), and Dodd–Frank.

Philip Fry, head of global financial compliance business at Verint, says the partnership with Cloud9 and the consequent offering was expedited by the pandemic. “We had a basic integration with Cloud9 already in place, but the [Covid-19] pandemic definitely pushed that to the forefront,” he says. 

One of the first deployments after the alliance was formed was for a Tier-1 bank that moved its traders to remote working due to the pandemic. The bank deployed Cloud9’s soft turret on its traders’ devices alongside Verint to ensure recording, storage, monitoring and retrieval of interactions from over 500 Cloud9 endpoints. Going forward, the bank is now in a position to continue to operate at corporate office locations and remotely.

One feature that Fry is looking to work on in the coming year is the idea of an “ethical wall.” This is where a company can use Verint and Cloud9 to create a specific policy to inhibit collusion between traders in different parts of the business and reduce the potential for fraud. For example, one policy could be that equities cannot talk to swaps, and so, if the software sees that traders from each of those business lines are talking, the company can block it or insert a compliance officer.