Big brother is watching: Russia’s BCS installs surveillance tools
BCS will use b-next surveillance tools to track trading activity
Russia’s BCS Financial Group is to install market abuse surveillance, insider dealing and compliance tools from specialist firm b-next, as the firm prepares to enter the UK market.
BCS is making its debut into the UK investment banking market. The b-next CMC Suite toolset is designed to monitor a range of scenarios over the bank’s orders and execution flow, analysing activity across multiple asset classes including equities, derivatives and bonds. The idea is to increase the bank’s oversight of its own activity and protect against any illegal activity. Provisions against market abuse were also a requirement to operate in the UK.
“Russian firms in line with all other international operations are under pressure to adhere to tight market abuse guidelines and regulations in the EU in order to operate in the UK and across Europe,” said Martin Porter, global sales director at b-next. “Firms like BCS are looking to market surveillance firms to ensure that they have systematic tools to allow them to monitor and identify complex, dangerous trends and suspicious patterns. BCS has extensive expertise in developing systems which can provide clients with efficient execution. We are delighted to be integrating into their internal trading systems to provide required high standards of market surveillance.”
Earlier this month, BCS Prime Brokerage announced plans to implement a new pre-trade risk system called TripleCheck, which it says will help it to meet tough new regulations on algorithmic and proprietary trading. Built by Succession Systems, the new tools check trading activity to protect against mistakes such as ‘fat finger’ errors, as well as checking more complex tasks such as multi-market portfolio margin limit calculations.
BCS claims to be the largest trader of equities and derivatives on the Moscow Exchange by turnover, with a 10-15% market share of equity trading. The firm is a recent arrival in the UK, where it obtained a licence from regulator the FCA earlier this year. It also appointed former Liquidnet Europe chief executive John Barker in an advisory role in January 2013.
