London, 26th March 2020: Regulations impacting the global financial services community, such as the EU MAR requirements and U.S. Dodd-Franks anti-manipulation rules, mean all market participants need a comprehensive automated monitoring system to detect suspicious behaviour. To help participants comply with multiple requirements and avoid severe regulatory consequences, RIMES, the global leader in data management and RegTech solutions, and SOTERIA, a cutting-edge Real-Time Communication Compliance and Surveillance solution, today announced the completion of their initial product integration phase. The new service marries trade and communication monitoring, to provide financial firms with truly comprehensive surveillance capabilities.
Adhering to growing regulations and evolving regulatory surveillance capabilities is technically complex and both data- and resource-intensive. The new approach from RIMES and SOTERIA solves these issues by providing data-driven, best-in-class Market Manipulation and Insider Dealing Detection capabilities.
Within RIMES’ RegFocus℠ Market Surveillance (RFMS) service, users can identify defined suspicious behaviours and patterns, which can be investigated fully using SOTERIA’s real-time communications capture and surveillance capabilities for all audio, video and electronic records.
The new RIMES-SOTERIA integration is the industry’s first ever unified surveillance service, which creates workflow efficiencies, significantly reducing review time. By unifying communications and trading exceptions, effective and robust compliance risk controls for both buy-side and sell-side financial services firms are redefined.
Andrew Barnett, Global Head of Product, RIMES, commented:
“Being able to effectively navigate the complex regulatory landscape is one of the biggest challenges that financial services firms on the buy-side and sell-side are facing.
By combining RIMES’ industry-leading data expertise and SOTERIA’s best-in-class solution, we are providing our clients with a market-leading surveillance capability. Our clients can now respond to an increasingly complex regulatory environment, cost-effectively and with ease, speed and, most importantly, reliability.”
In practice, the RIMES-SOTERIA integration supports financial service firms by:
- Creating trading-based alerts in RIMES RFMS which passes search criteria to SOTERIA to enable a related search of communications
- Providing access to SOTERIA directly from RIMES RFMS as a dedicated instance and providing an integrated review and workflow process
- Enabling search criteria modification in SOTERIA to perform further investigation
- Flagging communications of interest within SOTERIA and linking these to the related RIMES alerts
Rob Houghton, Creator of SOTERIA, commented:
“The idea of marrying trade and communication surveillance cornerstones is not a new concept and has been the subject of ‘blue-sky’ discussions within the industry over the last few years. This is however the first time that such an integration has been successfully achieved and this fundamentally comes down to having the right robustly-built solution architectures on each side, with secure open-API capabilities to enable true collaboration.
The problem others have faced in the past is that their respective solutions on either the trade or communication surveillance side are actually already patchworks of multiple vendor solutions, and therefore are not built as a standalone agnostic offering, fit for complex integration purposes. I think it also takes a truly collaborative approach from each party, with the united vision being to create what is best for the industry participants, and not for themselves; this is where partnering with RIMES has created a great synergy.”
