Trade surveillance

Overview

Acuity Knowledge Partners’ (Acuity’s) trade surveillance support enables compliance teams to do more with less. We help our clients adhere to regulatory standards in addition to their own internal policies and procedures, and manage reputational and financial risk that could arise because of incorrect trades, market abuse or insider trading.

We help companies strengthen their compliance controls to reduce risk of non-compliance. Our team of expert’s acts as an extension of the client team, helping them navigate short- and-long-term requirements.

Our team of experts is tool-agnostic and has extensive experience in surveillance systems such as Bloomberg’s Transaction and Cost Analysis (BTCA), Nice Actimize, Nasdaq SMARTS, FIS Compliance Suite and Charles River. They also have deep domain understanding of global regulations such as SEC directives, MiFID II, MAR, MAD II and CFTC.

Who we serve

Trade surveillance support we offer

Reviewing and monitoring trade surveillance models

Front-running
Cross-trades
Wash trades
Spoofing and layering
Aggregate order allocation
Fair allocation
Best execution
Ramping
Marking the close
Quote stuffing
Large-order detection
Trade and volume concentration
Unusual trading activity

Reviewing and monitoring exceptions

Analysing alerts based on facts and intellectual processes
Conducting secondary quality checks to ensure sanity and accuracy of all processed alerts

Reporting breaches

Escalating any anomaly to the Compliance Advisory Team
Compliance Advisory Team investigating and analysing the escalated alerts
Sending a suspicious transaction report to the regulators to report a true alert

Validating and enhancing models

Helping to continuously test evolving models in line with regulators’ monitoring protocols
Helping to improve surveillance programmes focused on OTC products

Project support

Implementing new surveillance tools
Providing support during system migrations
Parallel testing of alerts
Conducting remedial activities
Forensic testing

How we are different

Experience

We implement industry best practices to create an efficient and robust process framework, ensuring a flawless and sustainable surveillance infrastructure.

Systems expertise

We are tool-agnostic and are experienced in trade compliance systems such as Bloomberg’s Transaction and Cost Analysis (BTCA), Nice Actimize, Nasdaq SMARTS, FIS Compliance Suite and Charles River.

Technology-driven solutions

Our experts deploy modern technology to ensure superior analysis, efficient workflow and robust and auditable controls.

Process optimisation

We conduct deep-dive analyses to design efficient trade surveillance operating models for gap analysis (in terms of regulatory changes) and incorporate the changes to make the solution more efficient and effective in any compliance environment.