Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ:PRGS), a leading software provider that enables enterprises to be operationally responsive, has further advanced its real-time market monitoring and surveillance capabilities with the launch of a Progress Market Surveillance and Monitoring Solution Accelerator product.
The Market Surveillance and Monitoring Solution accelerator enables financial institutions, exchanges and market regulators to detect patterns of abusive or erroneous trading activity and take corrective action to prevent trading fraud and abuse in real-time. Moreover, the new Solution accelerator automates the steps necessary to manage any subsequent investigation and supports the sophisticated case management of alerts.
The new Market Surveillance and Monitoring Solution accelerator is built on the Progress Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite. The Progress RPM suite brings together real-time visibility, immediate sense-and-respond, and continuous business process improvement capabilities into one unified platform. This Progress RPM solution accelerator is a significant advancement to the Progress Apama Market Surveillance and Monitoring Accelerator product announced last year with enhanced features including improved market abuse pattern detection, integrated workflow, alert management, case management and collaboration.
Adam Honore, research director, Aite Group, said: "The regulatory talk right now focuses on throttling or dumbing down trading technology so regulatory agencies can keep up with the firms they are expected to monitor. Further, while risk managers are seeing more influence in technology internally, many continue to rely on after-the-fact reporting systems. Regulators should instead be pushing real-time monitoring and responsive technology both for themselves and the firms they govern to keep up with trading trends instead of trying to slow innovation."
Effective trade monitoring is a key component in sustaining confidence in the markets. With the looming threat of regulatory oversight, market participants such as brokers are now choosing to pro-actively monitor and control trade execution in order to mitigate risk, rather than rely upon exchanges or regulators to provide such monitoring.
When an unusual market event occurs -- for example, an unusually large or suspected rogue trade -- an alert is automatically generated in real-time to signal that there is a potential issue. The rules-based platform allows such alerts to be assigned to specific individuals or groups who are responsible for taking the appropriate actions. For example, if a firm's trading patterns begin to exhibit behaviour indicative of insider trading, an alert would immediately prompt a compliance officer to notify the trading desk, the market, and regulators of a potential problem, and begin an investigation before more damage is done. The Progress Market Surveillance and Monitoring Solution Accelerator product is non-intrusive and senses and responds to market events in real-time, without compromising ultra-high frequency execution speed.
Dr. John Bates, Progress Software's chief technology officer and senior vice president of corporate development and strategy said: "A massive increase in trading venues and vehicles, including dark pools, ECNs, and MTFs, has created a dangerously fragmented market that is increasingly challenging to police. Rogue trading and fraudulent activity have become increasingly difficult to control. The goal must be to sense these trades -- be they errors or fraud -- as they are taking place and ideally before they move markets. Real-time market surveillance across trading destinations, and across trading firms, helps to anticipate and to prevent these from happening before it is too late."
Regulators, exchanges, ECNs and MTFs themselves also need to monitor market activity proactively to prevent fraud and ensure compliance. The patterns of trading which are of interest may change rapidly over time as regulations and trading behaviour changes. The Progress Surveillance Accelerator provides sophisticated and easy-to-use tools that address their unique needs, with the power to adjust to different scenarios as the market evolves.
The latest in a series of Progress RPM Solution Accelerators to be announced by Progress, the new Market Surveillance and Monitoring Accelerator harnesses the power of the unique Progress RPM suite -- bringing together capabilities of Business Transaction Management (BTM), Business Event Processing (BEP) and Business Process Management (BPM) technologies through a unified, interactive environment, the Progress Control TowerTM. The Progress Control Tower technology offers an interactive graphical studio to model, visualize, adjust and control complex business processes, of which market surveillance and monitoring is a prime example.