NASDAQ OMX Launches SMARTS for Global FX Surveillance

The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc. (Nasdaq:NDAQ), the world's leading provider of market technology, today announced the launch of its SMARTS FX Trade Surveillance for global foreign exchange (FX) trading.

The SMARTS FX Trade Surveillance module gives surveillance and compliance teams the ability to monitor trading in FX products for possible manipulation of rate fixes, insider trading/front-running, unusual pricing and other suspect behaviors. As a means to monitor and mitigate risks associated with the FX market, the new SMARTS FX offering provides a comprehensive visualization of all trading in individual currency pairs. This includes Spot, Forward, and Non-Deliverable Forward (NDF) instruments - with forthcoming extensions for FX options. This capability provides compliance professionals with an unprecedented view and deeper understanding of trading activity in the context of market activity and rate fixes. 

Moreover, SMARTS enables firms to compare their trading activities against feeds from multiple market data providers as well as their own firms' quoted spread in a single view, thus eliminating the sole dependency on the content of any single market data provider.

"As the regulatory requirements in the FX market continue to evolve, it has been a challenge for brokers and their compliance teams to identify where to initiate monitoring activity and to focus their resources," said Rob Lang, Vice President and Global Head of SMARTS, NASDAQ OMX. "Through a co-development initiative with six major FX trading firms, SMARTS has worked to define the behaviors that support the FX surveillance priorities of these industry players, as well as develop a set of now-deployed alerts within the unique data constraints of the FX markets."   

NASDAQ OMX's comprehensive SMARTS service for equities, options, commodities, fixed income, energy and futures enables compliance teams to source, capture and maintain all trading data elements required to conduct in-depth analysis for cross-market, cross-asset market abuse and market manipulation. Through direct customized exchange feeds and drop copy connections, SMARTS infrastructure sources complete member order and execution data -- including private trading data -- directly from equities, derivatives and commodities exchanges.