Eventus won Best in RegTech at the 2022 Markets Choice Awards.
Traders Magazine caught up with Ollie Cadman, Chief Product Officer at Eventus, to learn more.
What is your reaction to winning the Award at the 2022 Markets Choice Awards?
As the leading provider of trade surveillance and risk monitoring solutions, we are thrilled to win the Award for Best in RegTech for the third year in a row at the 2022 Markets Choice Awards. We are committed to providing best-of-breed compliance software technology for our clients and pride ourselves on our expertise, deliverability and dynamic flexibility.
Please tell us about your Validus platform and its most important features / How does your platform stand out?
Our SaaS-based Validus platform employs robotic process automation (RPA), including machine learning (ML), to ensure only the most actionable alerts are escalated for further investigation through anomaly detection and pattern analysis, enabling clients to reduce response time and avoid time-wasting chases. Our advanced analytics and procedural automation can filter out noise and false positives, producing higher quality alerts, while preserving information for both regulatory and supervisory review and analysis of patterns and practices. This automation complements hundreds of ready-to-use trade surveillance and risk-monitoring procedures and a sandbox environment to test and quickly deploy new procedures and calibrations.
Validus is the only platform providing the ability to cast such a wide net while escalating only the most actionable alerts. Our procedural foundation allows clients to enjoy much-needed auditability and “explainability,” helping users answer regulators’ inquiries in a supportable, easy-to-understand fashion. Our RPA also provides transparency and the flexibility to deploy and adapt this dynamically. Our clients get the unique benefit of an off-the-shelf solution that’s also fully customizable – bringing together the best of the build and buy worlds but without the need to invest in infrastructure, upgrades or technology support.
Intuitive and scalable, Validus runs as a service in the cloud in real-time and T+1, leveraging more than 70 ready-to-use technology integrations. We offer native API access, giving clients maximum flexibility and interoperability. Our unique ability to ingest any data type in any format streamlines onboarding and reduces time to market. Validus is extremely scalable and built to handle alert remediation of billions of messages per day, 24/7 in real time, ensuring exhaustive coverage across trading flows. Our fully customizable surveillance procedures reduce response times and increase agility.
The regulatory landscape globally never stands still. Validus enables clients to quickly amend their surveillance tools to address changing needs and match their risk assessments. The new features and technology enhancements we introduce are heavily influenced by extensive client input and requests. Our clients consistently appreciate our responsive, nimble service, our ability to deliver, and the depth of market and regulatory expertise among our staff. We are laser-focused on hiring experienced market practitioners who can collaborate closely with clients every step of the way because they’ve been in their shoes.
We’re also unique in the depth of experience and functionality across asset classes – from equities, futures and options, to fixed income, FX, commodities and digital assets. On the latter, we provide real-time trade surveillance for many of the most recognizable crypto exchanges in the world.
How do you meet the needs of market participants, exchanges, and regulators?
The unmatched versatility of our Validus platform enables clients to address evolving regulations and exchange rules globally in the many jurisdictions in which they operate to meet their distinct trade surveillance and risk monitoring needs. Validus monitors, tracks and analyzes trade flows and financial risk to maximize the efficiency of clients’ regulatory and compliance operations. Clients include tier-1 banks, exchanges, broker-dealers and FCMs, prop trading firms, buy-side institutions, and energy and commodity trading firms, and Validus has a powerful track record in the most complex, high-volume, real-time environments of these sophisticated entities.
We enable users to conduct surveillance activity on more than 100 exchanges and market centers globally, regularly adding new markets as clients need them. Clients deploy, customize and operate Validus as a SaaS or hosted solution, surveilling across the full spectrum of asset classes, including equities, options, futures, FX, fixed income and digital assets.
Our Validus platform solves numerous challenges for clients, including:
● Helping compliance staff with ready-to-use tools for discovering all types of market manipulation strategies, addressing even the most complex market abuse behaviors, and for meeting and/or enforcing regulations and exchange rules both in T+1 and real-time.
● Giving risk managers real-time risk monitoring capabilities.
● Lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO) by escalating the most actionable alerts using workflow tools to accelerate evaluation and time to market, ending problematic cycles of false positives and increasing productivity and scalability. This frees up surveillance analysts to spend their time on more pressing matters that require their personal attention.
Validus has a powerful signal infrastructure that can generate a customizable range of market and behavioral statistics to provide greater insights into activity and trends of clients, accounts and trades. Combined with our JupyterLab/Python environment, this provides a versatile platform on which clients, exchanges and regulators can query the underlying data to gain dynamic insights, rapidly respond to specific business queries and quickly validate hypotheses.
Specifically in digital assets, where Validus is the platform of choice for centralized exchanges, we’re seeing a continued need for a single pane of glass to monitor risk across off- and on-chain activities, and we’re working with a number of our industry partners, including on-chain analytics providers, to provide a holistic view of risk.
How has Regtech evolved over the years and how has Eventus adapted?
We have seen a continued need for real-time surveillance as markets evolve, new regulations and rules are introduced, and trading volumes continue to grow; with the evolution of API-first technology platforms, this data can be more easily integrated into the wider trading stack as part of the decision-making process.
The continued fragmentation of trading flows across different platforms and market access models, along with continued expansion of algo deployment on the buy side, makes it more challenging for clients to consolidate their flows in a single, standardized repository. Our ability to rapidly ingest new sources of data, normalized to a single data model, from all major third-party OMS/platforms, direct from the exchange or any custom data sources, ensures we’re able to bring in all of the necessary data flow and provide tools, such as our JupyterLab environment, to analyze and interrogate the data.
The constantly evolving regulatory landscape, along with wider macro-market events, means it’s more important than ever for clients to have a transparent, explainable and responsive compliance program. Our ability to cast a wide net but only surface the most actionable alerts to users ensures they’re able to maximize their compliance resources.
What are recent accomplishments for Eventus?
We are very proud of our accomplishments in the past year, including our growing, skilled and talented team. We recently surpassed the 100-employee milestone and have experienced team members on the ground in 10 countries, with a growing presence throughout EMEA and APAC. In this year alone we have signed a wide range of new clients – many of these the most recognizable names in their respective asset classes – and re-signed existing clients, and we’re very pleased that our pipeline is as full as it’s ever been. We closed on a $30 million Series B funding round in September that enabled us to further fuel our expansion.
We continually enhance our Validus platform , with new functionality including a new Order Book Replay feature, allowing clients to step through specific market events to understand how they impacted behaviors and any attempt to manipulate the market.
We also partnered with digital asset regulatory and compliance leaders TRM Labs and Notabene to create Project TEN, a one-stop, single-pane-of-glass solution for firms across the digital-asset ecosystem, solving for anti-money laundering (AML), trade surveillance and Travel Rule compliance.
What can we expect from Eventus in the near future?
We’re constantly talking to our clients about what we can do to make their jobs easier, as well as monitoring regulatory developments and new exchange rules that will impact our client base. Among the developments in the works: New cross-venue and cross-product surveillance insights and analytics, expanding our behavioral statistics to help identify patterns and anomalies; new case management capabilities; expanded robotic process automation features; and a complete refresh of our user interface and workflow ensuring client operations gain maximum efficiencies and focus on the most high-priority and pressing alerts.
What is your outlook for Regtech?
Regtech solutions will evolve and advance to keep pace with both financial and technological innovations, and to stay ahead of both regulatory change and scrutiny. The digital asset revolution combines financial and technological innovation in a manner that forces compliance teams to consider more data sources (on/off blockchain), to combine skill sets across multiple governance verticals (KYC, AML, risk, trade surveillance), and to evaluate compliance risk across markets and products. Regtech solutions in this place will be API-driven and allow users to employ best-in-breed tools to cover specific use cases. As jurisdictions globally develop regulatory frameworks and prepare to enforce both existing and new laws and regulations, digital-asset market participants will seek out appropriate technical solutions to future-proof their growing business.
Advances in Regtech are not limited to the digital asset space. Regulators globally continue to focus on compliance and surveillance frameworks in traditional asset classes. The recently published FCA Market Watch 69 demonstrates a continued focus on surveillance methodology and risk assessments. As the Consolidated Audit Trail in the U.S. becomes a reality, compliance and surveillance teams will evaluate how to best use such data in their own programs. The SEC’s proposal for certain liquidity providers in the fixed income markets to register as dealers will likely result in improved Regtech solutions to monitor related activity. FCA Market Watch 68 focused on gaps in surveillance for web-based trading platforms used for rates and fixed income products as well. The recent spate of enforcement actions in the energy/commodity markets will spur that community to think more holistically about its technical solutions. Lastly, Regtech solutions will increasingly consider cross-market/product surveillance as regulators globally increasingly cite such concerns, e.g. Canada’s recent MoU.
