Could it for example have enabled SocGen to detect and even prevent its €5 billion of losses caused by a rogue trader dealing in European stock futures? Maybe not. But it appears that in a new post-MiFID world, with multiple MTFs springing up and all of them looking to compete with one another on speed of trading and cost, that market surveillance and risk management is becoming more of an issue.
Project Turquoise, the MTF set up by a consortium of investment banks, has announced that it will incorporate a "real-time" market surveillance system combining Progress Apama's Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine and Detica's market surveillance expertise.
Turquoise's post-trade market surveillance system will capture breaches of trading rules, detect market irregularities and develop enhanced trading execution analytics. But given the risk failings that have been highlighted at individual banks recently, one has to ask how effective these technologies are.
The UK's Financial Services Authority (FSA) also worked with Progress Apama and Detica on its "next-generation market surveillance platform", called Sabre II, which also uses CEP to process and analyse real-time event streams. According to reports, the FSA's old market surveillance system only had "end-of-week" capabilities as opposed to the ability to detect market irregularities in real time.
If MTFs and the FSA are relying on CEP for market-compliance issues, is this likely to filter down to the individual bank level where risk management and detection systems are found to be wanting?
Giles Nelson, director of technology, Progress Software, says it is seeing an increasing number of organisations using technology to provide an integrated real-time view of their position and risk analytic systems, which he anticipates will only increase as electronic trading volumes increase.
"With the increasing pace of electronic trading it's vital that a real-time view is available. The volatility in markets over this last week demonstrates the need for this."
1 comment:
A real time view of what? Once you have identified the irregularity (as Soc Gen did) you will need to deal with it. The issues at Soc Gen look like Separation of Duties problems with a bit of Joiner-Transfer-Leaver process thrown in and wouldn't be picked up by patter matching software.
Something like this could cause increased volatility as false positives get identified and send everyone on a selling / buying spree.
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