Asian Bank DBS Taps NASDAQ to Up Its Market Surveillance Efforts

DBS, a Singapore-headquartered financial services group, has announced its plans to boost its surveillance and market integrity efforts by onboarding the trading surveillance technology of the American exchange, NASDAQ.

On Thursday, the group in a statement noted that the technology will enable it to double down on its abilities to analyze comprehensive market abuse surveillance cases and patterns.

Additionally, the solution will enable Southeast Asia's largest bank to detect trading anomalies across the equities, derivatives and over-the-counter forex markets.

On top of that, DBS believes that the Software-as-a-Service solution will empower its analysts to optimize the time they spend detecting and responding to potential risks of market abuse.

“The technology will provide DBS with a consolidated, flexible, and user-friendly view to manage and monitor market conduct across multiple trading venues and asset classes, while enabling DBS’ trade surveillance team to detect, investigate, and document a wide array of market abuse behaviors through alerts that can be tailored to subsets of the market and asset classes,” DBS explained.

Ko Chin Siong, the Chief Operating Officer of DBS Vickers, the brokerage arm of the group pointed out that the technology is an addition to DBS' existing suite of technologies deployed across all levels.

Onboarding the NASDAQ solution “will enable us to better protect our clients’ interests,” Songs added.

According to NASDAQ, the trade surveillance solution is used by more than 2,300 companies including banks, regulators and capital markets infrastructure operators.

Trade Surveillance in 2022

Trade surveillance remains a critical part of the financial industry in both traditional and emerging digital asset markets.

At the beginning of the year, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), America’s private self-regulatory organization, slammed a $350,000 penalty on E*TRADE, an electronic trading platform and a Morgan Stanley subsidiary.

FINRA said the fine was for the platform’s failure to establish and maintain its supervisory systems. The private regulator, among other allegations, claimed that E*TRADE failed to detect manipulative trading instances due to lapses in its systems.

Meanwhile, in July, Best Execution Solutions (BXS), a New York-based trade data analytics firm, launched a new trade surveillance platform.

BXS said the platform through a single screen helps users to detect potential market manipulations, take them up with the appropriate parties and resolve them.

Furthermore, the leading cryptocurrency exchange, Binance in April appointed Seth Levy to lead its effort to build and implement a surveillance infrastructure and system to safeguard users against fraud and manipulation.