Project First, the European Union-backed consortium, recently launched a prototype market surveillance system that can extract and analyse financial services-related sentiment from social media networks.
As part of the consortium, b-next, a specialist provider of market abuse surveillance, insider dealing and compliance software solutions, has developed two new and unique scenarios to monitor market surveillance.
FIRST addresses the challenges of dealing with unstructured information to generate patterns which can further enhance the user's overview of the market. b-next has worked alongside use case partners Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, Boerse Stuttgart, Interactive Data and the University of Hohenheim, to demonstrate ways to make use of the developed technologies in FIRST in the fields of market surveillance, risk management, and online retail brokerage and investment management.
As specialists in market surveillance, b-next's team of experts have developed two surveillance scenarios: 'Pump & Dump' and 'Market Sounding', to make use of large volumes of unstructured data in financial compliance and develop automated techniques to better detect market abuse and insider trading.
Wolfgang Fabisch, CEO b-next, said: "The developed prototype can make a major contribution to better detect market abuse and offers ground-breaking possibilities to increase the efficiency of market supervision and financial market regulation. In today's world of rapidly evolving financial markets, the ability to determine sentiment of market participants can be extremely valuable to detect and deliver decision support by aggregation, analysis and visualisation. We are pleased to be part of a project that is opening up new ways to extract information that can have a significant impact on the evolving conditions in advanced financial decision making."
b-next have been working on the FIRST project since it was launched in late 2010. The three-year project aimed to harness artificial intelligence to find information on the Internet that can be used to support financial decision makers, and was supported by a EUR4.6 million budget co-funded by the EU. The FIRST project analysed 15 million documents combined from 215 internet sources such as financial blogs, forums, and social media channels.