Joe Schifano is Global Head of Regulatory Affairs, Eventus.

What were the key theme(s) for your business in 2023?

Flexibility, automation, efficiency and expertise. These themes are among the reasons clients choose Eventus over legacy providers. We’ve always believed that the ability to customize our technology – to provide flexibility to meet not only the needs of different client types but also the evolving landscape of regulation – is a must for our offering.

Automation is a key part of our offering, and our use of automation speeds up the ability of our clients to triage their alerts and escalates those most actionable for further investigation. We’ve built more than 60 automations which fully resolve more than 75% to 85% of alerts on average, and most of our clients are using 10 to 20 different automations to streamline their alert workflow and add comments to each relevant alert that can be useful were they to be audited. This and the ability to rapidly deploy our Validus platform and access it securely from the cloud bring huge cost and time efficiencies.

In 2023 we expanded our Services team with professionals who’ve spent decades in trading environments, in-house surveillance roles and market regulation, in addition to fintech roles. Our expertise and ability to understand our clients’ challenges enable us to partner with clients and collaborate on how we can best help them achieve their goals. In 2023, we attracted new clients in each of our major regions, including tier-1 banks.

What are your expectations for 2024?

Surveillance leaders are fed up with stagnated innovation in their legacy surveillance systems, and a conservative but real revolution in surveillance techniques will quicken. This will come as surveillance leaders shed the “let’s use the same system as everyone else” mantra. It’s not working.

In our second annual Acuiti survey and report on Trade Surveillance published in October 2023, more than half of respondents reported that over 50% of the alerts they received were low quality. Over 60% said that they were spending time reviewing alerts that ultimately turned out to be false positives, while most respondents saw under 10% of their alerts resulting in escalation or intervention. Cue the definition of insanity…

The next question becomes, well, what do you want? When senior trade surveillance executives were asked, “What are the top trade surveillance software features you find the most challenging to improve?” more than 50% of respondents chose these three features: 1) Flexibility to customize the software, 2) Automations or machine learning that reduce manual tasks, and 3) Improved cross-product surveillance. Translation: control, efficiency and innovation!

How will the surveillance community evolve?

Change is not easy. And it is certainly impossible if you don’t take the first steps. In a report we commissioned in late 2023 with 1LOD, surveillance leaders highlighted a myriad of challenges including budget, lack of empowerment by senior management, data, false positives, new risks and the rise of artificial intelligence. There are ways to mitigate these challenges while advocating for change. When markets went from manual to electronic trading, surveillance evolved. When data volumes exploded during the financial crisis, surveillance evolved. And now, as the challenges above increase – the status quo is unsustainable. As always, surveillance must evolve.