NICE Actimize's SURVEIL-X: Improving Surveillance Effectiveness With Cloud and Advanced Analytics

NICE Actimize launched the SURVEIL-X solution in September 2019, and recently briefed Celent about the solution’s key features and roadmap. This briefing note summarizes our key takeaways.

Surveillance operations at capital markets firms are undergoing a sea of change driven by growing regulatory pressure, proliferation of trading venues and asset classes, and an explosion in the data universe especially involving communication data. Celent has discussed the need for combining trade and communication surveillance and leveraging advanced analytics such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for responding to these challenges.

Despite significant interest among capital markets firms to achieve holistic surveillance, progress has been limited so far. This is because of siloed operations, fragmented data and technology architecture, and lack of a unified solution supporting different types of surveillance and case management. It has proved to be difficult to integrate market, trading, and communication data, and seamlessly migrate from existing fragmented technology architecture to a unified approach in surveillance.

NICE Actimize has launched a cloud-native platform called SURVEIL-X to overcome these challenges. In SURVEIL-X, it has brought together all surveillance components – trade and communication surveillance, market data, and case management – and powered it with advanced analytics, and visualization and trade reconstruction capabilities.

A unified and component-based surveillance solution should help capital markets firms gradually move towards the end goal of achieving holistic surveillance because it does not require them to rip and replace existing solutions but offers them the opportunity to replace one component at a time. An included managed data services can further help in integrating operations across assets classes or business lines. Use of AI and machine learning can improve detection efficiency and reveal previously unknown suspicious behavior, while a centralized case management with advanced visualization capabilities helps in faster trade reconstruction and investigation thereby improving efficiency and effectiveness of surveillance operations. Use of the cloud offers better cost and scalability advantages; it also makes it easier to migrate to a holistic surveillance approach in a gradual manner through incremental transformation.