In the current economic environment, asset managers are increasingly concerned about the risk associated with trading operations as part of their overall compliance and risk management strategy. To address this need, Fidessa forged a partnership with a major asset management client, with trading operations in every region of the world, and has developed the most sophisticated trading risk and control system available in the marketplace today.

Richard Hooke, Buy-side Product Director at Fidessa, commented: "Monitoring and controlling trading activity has traditionally been handled by the OMS, but for many large asset managers this approach has become fragmented, difficult to control and insufficient. Working closely alongside a global, tier-one asset management client, we are delivering a single system to centralise control that has robust capabilities to oversee, analyse and impose restrictions on trading practices - something that has not previously been feasible."

Sentinel Trading Compliance captures and monitors large volumes of transaction-related data in an efficient, configurable and fully auditable workflow. With the capability to recognise unwanted trading patterns, restrict trades by attribute and limit cumulative volumes by counterparty, desk, trader or market; the system enables asset managers to centralise the monitoring and control of their trading operations across multiple systems, markets and trading desks for the very first time.

Providing a comprehensive pre-trade API, the solution is completely OMS-agnostic and comes together with an aggregated, post-trade monitoring suite. Fitting seamlessly alongside Fidessa's existing and widely-used Sentinel Portfolio Compliance system, Sentinel Trading Compliance provides the extensive risk controls that existing portfolio compliance systems alone cannot achieve.

"Having been developed closely in partnership with a client, Sentinel Trading Compliance sets a new, high standard for compliance risk systems in the buy-side trading space", continued Hooke. "The scalable nature of our solutions also means that it is available to any asset manager, regardless of size. In the current complex and evolving regulatory environment, it is something that no asset manager can risk being without."