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Combining Trade and eComms Surveillance to Meet the Needs of the New Normal Financial Sector

The financial sector is in a new compliance normal. Despite financial firms being famously conservative about their working practices, these businesses and their workers have had to find ways to work from home safely and securely – not only to avoid the virus but also to avoid the potential pitfalls of operating outside the physical gaze of the compliance team.

The Shield platform was always designed to evolve with these kinds of changing circumstances, adapting to surveil and record all appropriate eComms, whatever they are and wherever and whenever they are used. With this in mind, we agreed on a ground-breaking worldwide collaboration agreement late last year with FIS, a global leader in financial services technology, to deliver financial services to customers with a unique offering.

FIS has since offered Shield’s powerful Communication Surveillance and Data Management platform to its substantial client base worldwide, both as a standalone solution, and also combined with its own market-leading FIS Protegent trade surveillance platform.

A game-changer

At Shield, we have always seen strategic partnerships like the one with FIS as a vital part of our journey, but also as an important progressive change for the financial industry as a whole. Working with the huge market presence of FIS, and by integrating the trade and eComms side of surveillance together, we are moving the market forward from an obsolete holistic approach to a fully user-centric hybrid one.

Regulators such as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) have repeatedly warned firms that they must now provide the same standard of surveillance of staff working from home as they would in an office environment or face stiff penalties. Working together, Shield and FIS are addressing an obvious market need. This collaboration provides financial firms with a vital surveillance solution to support remote working and combat the ongoing potential dangers of misconduct and market abuse, whilst providing key operational efficiencies.

The hybrid approach

This collaboration empowers FIS customers with an eComms Surveillance technology that, among many other capabilities and benefits, links trade and communications data. This AI-powered approach improves alert quality, reducing operational costs and risks.

Crucially, by combining all the available data (both structured and unstructured) it also drastically reduces false positives, one of the biggest headaches and undoubtedly one of the biggest unnecessary consumers of time and resources for Compliance teams. With many firms facing 99+% false-positive alert rates, holistic surveillance not meeting the market expectations, and archiving solutions not being suitable for the new remote world, clearly something had to be done. The hybrid approach delivers the best solution all around.

The hybrid surveillance offering not only addresses market demands for a truly integrated solution, but it also caters to the growing need for Cloud deployment (and is available as part of FIS’s Cloud services too). Whilst Cloud has proven to be essential during current restrictions, all the signs are that this is a long-term and progressive trend (even before the pandemic) which takes advantage of the flexibility, cost benefits, and security of modern cloud solutions.

Joining forces to benefit everyone

By combining Shield’s domain expertise in communication analysis with FIS’s global presence, product, and services portfolio, together we are providing the next evolutionary layer of surveillance – a new, advanced, and AI-powered hybrid that delivers on its promises.

Both Shield and FIS Protegent already offer Compliance Officers powerful solutions to increasing data volumes and evolving regulations and risks. Working together we believe this will transform how the market conducts surveillance operations. Despite the considerable challenges of the last year, there are definitely exciting times ahead for us all.

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