Ancoa, provider of contextual surveillance and insightful analytics for exchanges, regulators, buy & sell-side firms, has announced that the financial consultant Tower Trading Group (TTG) has selected Ancoa’s market surveillance platform to monitor its multi-asset trading activities across all exchanges and Independent Services Providers (ISVs). Deployment of the Ancoa platform has been timed and designed to enhance TTG’s compliance function with the advent of the Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) which came into effect on July 3, 2016.
Detecting and dealing with manipulative trading practices to prevent market abuse has become a regulatory requirement for proprietary trading firms, market makers and brokers across a wide range of asset classes. Trading firms such as TTG need to demonstrate to regulators that they have adequate and automated surveillance capabilities in place, capable of detecting both market manipulation and manipulation intent, not only on transactions but orders as well.
TTG selected Ancoa’s cloud-based surveillance platform to enable the monitoring of all trading activity – at trader, group and company-wide level. The Ancoa platform overlays TTG’s transactions across all asset classes with market data and unstructured data, such as financial news, in order to put in context trading behaviour and identify potential risks of market abuse. The Ancoa surveillance platform offers rich forensic functionality to investigate suspicious transactions, the ability to replay the order book and carry out back-testing, as well as the option to configure alert parameters or calibrate alerts in-house according to trader strategies and risk appetite.
TTG’s 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 TTG’s compliance officers improve their responsiveness to potentially abusive trading behaviour.
Paul Snell, Head of Compliance, TTG, said:
“After evaluating several surveillance solutions we have chosen Ancoa because the platform offered next generation functionality that reflected the complexity of our business with sensible commercials that allow our business to evolve. Ancoa’s surveillance capabilities will considerably improve the efficiency of our compliance operations with cutting edge visual and workflow tools. TTG is constantly evolving, and we have partnered with an innovative provider that will complement us moving forward”.
Kurt Vandebroek, Ancoa
Kurt Vandebroek, Chief Executive Officer, Ancoa, added:
“We are delighted to welcome TTG to our ever-expanding universe of financial services customers. MAR has certainly focussed industry efforts to put in place adequate surveillance capabilities to uphold market integrity. We look forward to working with TTG and their clients, to ensure they fulfil their surveillance obligations with confidence”.