Smarts Group, the global leader in financial market surveillance technology today announced the launch of its world leading Smarts.broker market surveillance platform for the US.
The service monitors all major US securities markets and provides a full range of market manipulation and compliance alerts.
"We are pleased to now have a service available for the US. The US version of SMARTS.broker has been in development for over 12 months. In consultation with pilot customers the platform has undergone extensive customization for the specific requirements of this highly complex and sophisticated trading environment," said SMARTS Group CEO, Dr Andreas Furche.
"SMARTS has built a platform capable of proactively keeping up with changing US regulatory requirements in a fast-paced market, all the while accounting for future growth in US trading volumes and transaction data. The SMARTS platform comfortably handles several billion transactions per day," said Dr Furche.
SMARTS advanced market surveillance technology is the most widely adopted surveillance technology globally. SMARTS.broker is currently used by over 50 broking firms in 30 markets internationally in Europe, Canada and Asia/Pacific, including many of the largest international firms.
SMARTS.broker is a highly advanced managed service platform which can be rapidly deployed. It identifies market manipulation scenarios including marking the close, ramping, dominating the market, and wash trades. Among its comprehensive suite of alerts is the ability to identify unusual trading patterns around material news announcements, identify trade-throughs as per Reg NMS, as well as broker/client conflict and front-running scenarios.
Speaking at the launch of SMARTS.broker in New York, Mr Aldo Martinez, SMARTS board member and former Vice President of Market Surveillance at the NYSE Regulation said, "The launch of SMARTS.broker for the US markets is timely, particularly in light of the US government's current focus on rebuilding financial supervision and regulation as outlined in the July 2009 White papers on Financial Regulatory Reform. With financial institutioons increasingly 'being subject to strong oversight' [1] the US government has indicated that the bar has now been raised,"
"Brokers should continue to proactively embrace the robust supervision of financial firms by being self motivated to actively contribute to rebuilding investor confidence. Brokers need to monitor their market activity and maintain their own internal standards to meet this new level of surveillance and compliance and assist in promoting the 'transparency, fairness, accountability' [2] called for by the government and equally demanded by investors," concluded Mr Martinez.
Commenting on the international aspect of market surveillance, SMARTS CEO Dr Furche said, "With the increased focus on market integrity, the US can play a key role in raising the international regulatory standards and improving international cooperation, which is a key objective outlined in the white paper. For this to happen, brokers and exchanges require systems which are coordinated internationally and meet a global standard. Through the widespread take up of our systems in other regions, SMARTS has observed a marked improvement in the standard of market surveillance and compliance, contributing to an overall increase in market integrity in those regions."
"SMARTS.broker provides the benchmark for compliance systems worldwide. As the default international standard for market surveillance systems, SMARTS is well placed to partner with the US financial community to promote transparency, accountability and stability," said Dr Furche.
"We are delighted to introduce our globally recognized service to the US market. With reputation management being a key driver for broking businesses around the world, SMARTS.broker is assisting compliance executives to quickly identify and rapidly investigate any anomalies in their own trading, thereby protecting the broking house and it's reputation, all the while helping build trust back into the US securities markets," concluded Dr Furche.