Ancoa, providers of contextual surveillance and insightful analytics for exchanges, regulators, buy- & sell-side firms, today announced that Cenkos Securities, the independent specialist securities firm focused on UK small and mid-cap companies and investment firms, has selected Ancoa’s market surveillance platform to monitor its cash equities trading activities.
Ancoa was selected to specifically perform automated compliance checks based on Cenkos’ trading activities on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) where Cenkos operates as both a market maker and broker-dealer.
Market surveillance is being continually pushed higher up the regulatory agenda and new rules to uphold market integrity and investor protection in the form of the revised version of the Market Abuse Directive (MAD) and the Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) are due to come into force in July 2016. As a result, the focus is on market participants to meet new regulations that enforce stricter risk management and surveillance practices, which enable them to detect and deal with potential market manipulation.
Cenkos Securities selected Ancoa’s cloud-based surveillance solution to enable monitoring of all trading activity. The easy to deploy Ancoa platform overlays Cenkos’ cash equity transactions with LSE market data and Regulatory News Service (RNS) data, generating alerts to identify unusual trading activity and manage potential risks of market abuse. Cenkos’ compliance team can now take advantage of improved trading alert accuracy which significantly reduces the number of false positives. Coupled with powerful visualisation tools that aggregate all relevant trading data onto a single screen, Ancoa helps Cenkos’ compliance officers improve their responsiveness to potentially abusive trading behaviour, enabling them to meet their compliance obligations with confidence.
Kurt Vandebroek, Chief Executive Officer, Ancoa, added, “We are delighted that Cenkos Securities has chosen our surveillance platform to monitor their trading activities on the LSE. With the trading community firmly under the regulatory spotlight to prevent market manipulation, firms can no longer rely on out-dated systems to detect and deal with potentially manipulative trading activity. We are confident that our market surveillance capabilities will help Cenkos Securities adhere to new and emerging regulatory requirements and deliver a competitive differentiator to those looking to take advantage of Cenkos’ institutional investor capabilities.”
David Cooper, Head of Compliance, Cenkos Securities, added, “In order to meet ever-increasing regulatory and compliance obligations, we undertook a rigorous review of market surveillance firms before selecting and deploying Ancoa’s platform. Compared to other competitive products, Ancoa has reduced the total number of alerts highlighting suspicious trading activities by approximately 65%, retaining alerts that are wholly relevant and require manual review by our analysts. This approach has allowed our compliance team to conduct all of their surveillance related investigations in less than one and a half hours per day instead of typically half a day. This includes reviewing, interpreting and documenting the alerts raised by Ancoa, as well as discussing anomalies with traders and analysing alert trends over time for managerial purposes.”