Travis Schwab is CEO, Eventus.
What were the key themes for your business in 2024?
Eventus’ core themes for 2024 revolved around adaptability, scalability, cutting-edge technology and client-driven innovation in our platform. Enhancements to Validus have been pivotal, focusing on advanced analytics, seamless scalability and comprehensive market coverage to meet the diverse needs of our client base across asset classes and jurisdictions. Key advancements appreciated by clients include enhanced market visualization tools with dynamic zooming, faster performance, and increased flexibility for analyzing trades and orders. The platform’s new pattern and practice procedures empower firms to review behaviors across longer time periods, identify accounts with repeated alerts and detect patterns indicative of market manipulation. Transparency and customization have long been priorities at Eventus, ensuring surveillance procedures are easy to configure while delivering actionable insights through intelligent alerting. These developments allow compliance teams to swiftly adapt to market volatility, rising trade volumes and tighter regulatory demands, turning compliance into a strategic advantage. Our platform is designed by market practitioners and shaped by our clients in order to help solve their unique challenges, and this enables us to innovate and offer new capabilities to all clients continually.
What are firms’ biggest pain points in trade surveillance, and how are they addressing them as markets evolve?
Over the past year, firms’ pain points in trade surveillance have intensified as they face data quality issues, rising alert volumes and increasingly complex market dynamics. Poor data ingestion, inconsistent feeds and regulatory pressure to achieve venue completeness have made addressing surveillance gaps a top priority. Incomplete or untimely data undermines the effectiveness of surveillance systems, especially as firms expand their market coverage to include cross-product and cross-market manipulation.
At the same time, false positive alerts in surveillance platforms have surged amid market volatility, often overwhelming compliance teams and diverting attention from true risks. But all “noise” (which we would define as alerts that don’t lead to any immediate investigation or suspicious transaction reporting) is not necessarily a false positive, as there are some “true positives” with lower value that, taken together, can provide meaningful insight. Over-calibration of the system can produce a false sense of security and create blind spots in which unusual but potentially problematic behaviors are dismissed.
At Eventus, we are introducing AI-driven tools and behavioral analytics to improve accuracy, reduce alert noise and identify nuanced patterns of misconduct more effectively. In early 2025, we’ll be harnessing technologies like natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs) to automate manual tasks such as report generation, query building and case management, helping teams achieve greater efficiency. Validus-defined logic will enable users to apply their own internal guidelines to automatically close out alerts that don’t immediately rise to an actionable level, casting a wide net to capture problematic behavior without overwhelming the surveillance team with alerts. Each step is documented, providing clients with a complete audit trail including data points used and the reason for close-out. This will allow clients to include what may appear to be low-value alerts that are actually true positives and to leverage trend analytics for system calibration, follow-ups and insights into potential risks.
Workforce shortages remain a challenge, exacerbated by resource-intensive processes. Automation and scalable surveillance platforms are becoming essential for firms to alleviate manual workloads while addressing the rising complexity of their surveillance obligations. Additionally, advanced data visualization tools are helping compliance teams uncover correlations across venues, trades and platforms more seamlessly. Moving forward, firms are recognizing the need for proactive surveillance strategies, where real-time data, comprehensive coverage and innovative solutions allow them to stay ahead of emerging risks and regulatory demands.
What industry trends have been prominent but are now fading (or will soon fade)?
One fading trend is the reliance on legacy surveillance systems often built to monitor specific asset classes, regions or regulatory requirements. While these systems once met firms’ needs, they now struggle to address modern market complexities such as cross-market, cross-product and high-frequency trading. Fragmented, siloed solutions create inefficiencies and fail to provide comprehensive oversight, leaving firms exposed to undetected risks and regulatory scrutiny. They are also cumbersome to update and not customizable to a firm’s unique needs or regulatory challenges.
Legacy systems also face challenges with data integration and scalability. They were not designed to handle the massive data sets generated by today’s interconnected markets or the real-time monitoring regulators now expect. This inability to ingest, process and analyze diverse data sources results in coverage gaps, delays and incomplete insights into trading behaviors. Additionally, as firms expand their market footprint, maintaining these systems becomes increasingly costly and resource-intensive.
The shift is now toward modern, integrated surveillance platforms that can ingest, analyze and correlate data across asset classes, venues and channels in real time.
By moving away from legacy systems to scalable, adaptable solutions, firms can future-proof their surveillance programs, ensure comprehensive coverage and meet evolving regulatory demands. Those embracing this shift are not only enhancing compliance but also improving efficiency and gaining a strategic advantage in safeguarding market integrity.
