Sell-Side Technology Awards 2025: Best sell-side market surveillance product—Nasdaq

Overview

Today, firms on both sides of the industry are required to monitor trading across markets with visibility across multiple venues and asset classes. The volumes of data are vast, and analysts must sift through market and participant data and weave it into an investigative narrative with external data in order to properly identify and report suspicious activity. Without the right service and tools, firms struggle with alert volumes and identifying suspicious activity, putting markets and reputations at risk.

The solution  

Nasdaq Trade and Market Surveillance is designed to assist analysts by automating trade and behavior monitoring, including the evidence gathering across big data and the risk rating of that data. Simulating the way an analyst would identify suspicious activity and its risk rating through various forms of analytics including AI enables compliance personnel to allocate the bulk of resources to the complex investigative portion of the surveillance lifecycle, supported by a suite of visualization and data analysis tools.

Secret sauce  

Data and coverage:

• Data sourced from over 200 markets
• Coverage across all asset classes, including over-the-counter (OTC) and crypto
• Preconfigured and managed analytics addressing all typologies and regulatory requirements

Visualization tools:

• Whole-of-market view of customer trading against the context of the market (spread) and visualization of order-book depth
• Full order book visualization and market replay
• AI analytics and assisted investigations
• Detection of suspicious activity while assisting in evidence generation, analysis and risk rating

Recent milestones

Nasdaq’s software has significantly advanced its AI abilities including expert-driven behavioral machine learning analytics to detect suspicious activity and multi-agent generative AI, which assists investigations by automating data aggregation and insight/evidence generation.

Future objectives

Nasdaq will:

• Continue to embed AI across the complete surveillance lifecycle
• Introduce AI copilots to help clients calibrate analytics
• Develop additional behavioral machine-learning analytics
• Focus on detecting potential market abuse across disparate instruments with non-contractual links between them

Why they won

By winning the best sell-side market surveillance category, Nasdaq has produced arguably the least surprising result of all 33 categories on offer in this year’s Sell-Side Technology Awards. Needless to say, New York-based Nasdaq has, over the years, become synonymous with the market surveillance category in these and other WatersTechnology awards, thanks initially to its outstanding Nasdaq Smarts offering and more recently to its Nasdaq Trade and Market Surveillance platform, which is essentially a rebranded version/updated iteration of Smarts. 

Nasdaq Trade and Market Surveillance’s impressive trade surveillance and behavior monitoring functionality continues to serve its clients well across an area of the capital markets that is particularly well-suited to the deployment of AI in its various guises and flavors to help compliance personnel with the sheer grunt work around what is essentially a never-ending challenge. A quick glance down the list of Nasdaq’s future objectives illustrates just how important AI is to the firm and its flagship offering, which can only be a good thing for its extensive client roster. This year’s win makes it three on the bounce for Nasdaq and who would bet against it following up this year’s feat with another win next year?