Trading surveillance vendor B-Next has launched CMC: Benchmark Fixing Analysis, a system the company claims helps identify suspicious trading activity at the time of the FX fix.
According to the firm, it had already been responding to FX-related enquiries from brokers and investment banks by making enhancements to its existing product for surveillance and benchmark monitoring.
It is partnered with Thomson Reuters data in a bid to offer faster analysis of trading data and shorter implementation times.
Martin Porter, business development director at B-next, says: “With integration to Thomson Reuter’s data, we can perform monitoring for a firm around their contributions to the Fix. We’ve launched initially in FX and are close to extending this to other asset class benchmarks.”
According to the firm, it also offers automated detection scenarios to help identify suspicious trading activity at or around the time of the fix. It can be enabled for FX swaps and non-deliverable forwards (NDFs).
B-Next is the main supplier of market conformity in Germany, but according to Porter international demand has tended to focus more around monitoring for market abuse and insider compliance solutions. As a result, the firm’s London office has more emphasis on facilitating the monitoring of benchmarking contributions worldwide, which resulted in the recently launched system.
“FX is a vast OTC market which proves to be difficult for electronic monitoring, but that does not mean it is not possible to implement systematic surveillance,” argues Porter. “Trades are recorded and if anything are recorded electronically so surveillance can be performed – if you have the right software.”
