BST Awards 2024: Best buy-side market surveillance tool/platform—Kaizen

Overview

Kaizen’s surveillance solution provides trade and communications monitoring on a single, integrated system to help buy-side firms’ middle-office and compliance teams comply with market abuse regulations and detect spoofing, layering and other forms of market manipulation.

The solution  

• Supports evidence gathering and data storage in compliance with global market abuse regulations
• Features multi-channel communications monitoring across chat, email and voice, leveraging AI technology
• Includes policy and case management features, making it easier to manage paper trails and demonstrate compliance
• Provides a drag-and-drop feature, allowing buy-side firms to create a combined trade and communications feed
• Incorporates functionality to email fund managers questions and capture responses within the same alert

Secret sauce  

Kaizen’s surveillance solution is tailored specifically to the buy side and is designed to adapt and update quickly to meet firms’ specific needs. Its voice transcription solution offers a choice of AI models, as opposed to other similar platforms that tend to offer just one AI solution.

Recent milestones

Kaizen’s surveillance solution combines sophisticated technology with regulatory expertise to offer buy-side clients a continually evolving surveillance and market abuse platform. In the last 12 months, the firm launched a multi-solution AI voice transcription model as well as a market abuse risk assessment framework and guidance, which sit alongside the platform.

Future objectives

• Kaizen will explore AI solutions to enhance market abuse surveillance and its technology solutions. It participated in the UK Financial Conduct Authority’s Market Abuse Surveillance TechSprint event on October 9, exploring how the combination of regulatory reporting data and AI can enhance surveillance solutions.
• Kaizen will expand its training and community program around improving market abuse risk assessment and regulatory understanding across the buy side.

Why they won

London-based Kaizen wins this year’s best buy-side market/integrated surveillance platform category, thanks to its recently unveiled Kaizen Surveillance Solutions offering. Market surveillance is now a critical function for buy-side firms to manage accurately, efficiently and transparently—ideally without creating false positives, which can be disruptive and time-consuming to investigate—not only to keep their various competent authorities happy, but also to minimize the possibility of reputational risk resulting from market manipulation behavior emanating from within the business. To that end, Kaizen monitors not only trading activity, but chat, email and voice communication, too, ensuring that all market-related behavior and the communication supporting it is above board.

Kaizen joins eflow Global (2023), SteelEye (2020, 2021 and 2022) and Nasdaq (2019) as a recipient of this award.