01
Market Abuse Risk Assessment
Assessed abuse risk across the trading businesses to define what surveillance had to detect: typology by typology, asset class by asset class.
Case study
Trade surveillance rebuilt across ETD and OTC flow for a global investment bank
A Leading Global Investment Bank · Trade Surveillance
- Industry
- Capital Markets · Surveillance
- Region
- Australia · Global
- Duration
- Two-year transformation
At a glance
We took market-abuse surveillance from risk assessment through vendor selection to live platforms across exchange-traded and OTC flow — MAR- and ASIC-aligned, with AI tuning to suppress false positives.
- ~65%
- Fewer false-positive alerts (AI tuning)
The engagement
Overview
One of the world's leading global investment banks engaged Capmark to lead its Market Surveillance Transformation, a market-abuse risk assessment, the end-to-end selection and implementation of ETD and OTC trade-surveillance platforms, and a multi-year roadmap to strengthen detection and regulatory posture.
The challenge
What we were asked to solve.
Surveillance coverage had not kept pace with the breadth of the bank's trading: energy and commodities, fixed income, asset management and currencies across global venues. Regulators expected provable coverage aligned to MAR and ASIC market-integrity obligations, while alert quality was poor enough to drown analysts in false positives. The platforms had to be selected, proven and implemented without disrupting the desks they watched. And because the chosen platform would be a cloud-hosted vendor solution fed by the front-office trading systems, the bank needed assurance over data lineage, cyber security and the handling of PII and securities data before any feed went live.
Our approach
How we delivered.
We owned the full delivery lifecycle, from risk assessment and vendor selection through sandbox evaluation to production go-live and the roadmap beyond it.
02
Vendor Selection Done Properly
Ran the RFI/RFP, sandbox proof-of-concept and commercial negotiation for the surveillance platforms, selecting on evidence, not demos.
03
Implementation to Go-Live
Delivered the platforms into production: privacy and cyber assessments, functional and non-functional requirements, solution design, data mapping integrated across Fidessa, Aladdin, Bloomberg, Murex and NASDAQ SMARTS source systems, testing and change management.
04
Data Lineage & Source Integration
Traced data lineage from the front-office trading platforms down into surveillance, so every alert tied back to its source: energy trading on Allegro, Trayport, LMEselect, CME, ICE and EEX; fixed income on Yieldbroker; asset management on Charles River, MarketAxess and Tradeweb; and FX on FXAll, 360T, ASX24 and EBS. PII and securities data were scrubbed where the use case did not need them, while the feeds stayed integrated with the market-data platforms and the ISIN central reference-data systems that identify each instrument.
05
Cyber Security & Technical Resilience
Ran a cyber-security assessment over the cloud-hosted vendor solution and built the availability, recovery and access controls that keep the platform resilient and the data protected end to end.
06
Model Development in Alteryx & R
Built and tuned the detection logic for some flows in Alteryx and R, working alongside the bank's quantitative analysts to map algorithmic trading behaviours — spoofing, layering, momentum ignition — to surveillance scenarios and calibrate thresholds against real trade data.
07
Cyber Security Assessment
Assessed the security posture of the surveillance infrastructure, identifying and remediating vulnerabilities across the data pipeline and platform hosting environment.
08
Data Governance
Established data lineage, ownership and quality controls across the surveillance data estate, covering source-system feeds from ETD and OTC venues through to alert generation.
09
AI Alert Optimisation
Identified AI/ML opportunities to lift alert quality and suppress false positives, so analyst time lands on genuine risk.
10
Multi-Year Roadmap
Performed strategic gap analysis across the trade flows and defined the surveillance roadmap that strengthens detection year on year.
The outcome
The measurable impact.
Surveillance now covers exchange-traded and OTC flow on a cloud-hosted platform selected through evidence-based procurement and delivered to production, with data lineage traced from the front office, PII and securities data controlled, cyber-security and resilience assured, detection models built in Alteryx and R alongside the bank's quants, and a multi-year roadmap in place. The programme also lifted delivery maturity across the group's change portfolio, leaving a stronger PMO discipline behind it.
- ~65%
- Fewer false-positive alerts (AI tuning)
More client results
Continue reading.
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