Sell-Side Technology Awards 2023: Best sell-side compliance product—SteelEye

Overview

For financial services firms, monitoring the wide variety and high volume of communications across ever-expanding collaboration channels is complex and costly―as is complying with increasing trade surveillance regulations. A key reason for this is the fact that communications and trade surveillance systems typically aren’t aligned, which results in inefficient processes. It also creates a lack of oversight, which can lead to missed risk signals and challenges when onboarding new tools and channels.

The solution

With SteelEye, compliance teams don’t need to look in multiple places to assess risk―they get a single source of data across trades, communications, news and market data. This provides them with complete oversight, a consistent process, and speedy investigations. Proactive monitoring allows firms to effectively detect all potential market manipulation risks while contextual data reduces false positives. The cloud-based platform delivers enterprise-grade security, speed, efficiency, and intelligence.

Secret sauce

SteelEye’s trade surveillance solution provides firms with the ability to track and understand market activity, while the communications-monitoring tool helps to keep tabs on eComms, ensuring they comply with regulatory mandates/guidelines. Cross-platform data covering trades, communications, market/pricing information and news is presented on a single screen, enabling compliance teams to investigate scenarios and determine efficiently and accuracy whether rules have been breached.

Recent enhancements

• SteelEye released a financial services-specific transcription engine calibrated for finance/industry jargon that transcribes voice-to-text 120% faster than other transcription services.
• SteelEye launched its Order Book Replay solution, allowing compliance teams to play, pause, rewind, fast forward, slow down and speed up order book activity to accurately analyze market movements.
• SteelEye appointed a former Microsoft and Google executive, Christopher Pennington, as chief revenue officer to strengthen customer engagements and commercial functions.

Future objectives

SteelEye plans to develop the following:

• A deep linguistic surveillance solution: using advanced language processing techniques to analyze and monitor communications across all platforms, providing insights into patterns of behavior and detecting potential security risks or threats
• Behavior detection for comms and trades: technology that detects anomalies in communication and trading patterns, providing real-time alerts for potentially fraudulent or suspicious activity
• Machine learning: algorithms that monitor communication data to trigger alerts in real time, improving the efficiency and accuracy of communications surveillance

Why they won

SteelEye is no stranger to the winners’ circle of these awards and the annual Buy-Side Technology Awards, thanks to its outstanding Integrated Surveillance offering. London-based SteelEye is by no means the only provider in this highly complex and competitive space―there are other providers that offer similar functionality, but SteelEye’s differentiators are its integration and the ability to present compliance personnel with all the information they could want via a single GUI, eliminating the laborious “swivel-chair” phenomenon.