Markets Compliance Solutions That Automate Compliance Oversight: NICE Actimize

By combining compliance risk controls, reporting and resources, NICE Actimize solutions automate and validate compliance oversight’

The price of trading in today’s global economy is strict adherence to a wide range of global regulations. Financial institutions must have effective regulatory compliance that encompasses cross-asset class and cross-market trade surveillance, monitoring activities for market manipulation, fraud, behavioral patterning, and more. NICE Actimize’s Markets Compliance solutions enable firms to more closely monitor a broad range of products to identify non-compliance issues and record activities. By combining compliance risk controls, reporting and resources, its solutions automate and validate compliance oversight.

There are a number of areas that NICE Actimize’s Financial Markets Compliance line of business excels in its market, and these areas include its industry-leading detection algorithms that mitigate compliance risk; a modern and intuitive user interface that increases productivity and insight; centralized case management and oversight that improves investigation effectiveness; and a scalable, enterprise platform that supports the requirements of evolving regulations across an organization.

Consistently ranked as number one in the space, NICE Actimize is the largest and broadest provider of financial crime, risk and compliance solutions for regional and global financial institutions, as well as government regulators. Founded in 1999, the company’s global headquarters are located in the US, EU and APAC. Its US offices are in Hoboken, NJ and Atlanta, GA.

View from the Top: GM Puja Agrawal Talks Compliance

Why was your financial markets compliance line of business established?
There was clearly a growing need in compliance which we identified early on – not just to address regulatory concerns, but to address overall concerns around risk.

How have your customers motivated you to shape your offerings/grow the company?
Our customers are our prime motivators – listening to their needs is inextricably linked to how we shape our offerings and set our priorities.

If you could list the most important factors that have proved to be the biggest asset to your line of business in financial markets compliance, what would they be and why?
Our biggest assets are our domain expertise, which is broad across a range of financial markets compliance issues, our diverse customer base, and last, the strength and talent of our people with respect to professional services acumen along with research and development. All these components work together effectively to provide value and support to the market on an ongoing basis – our customers and talent working well together to address major market concerns.

What do you feel are the reasons behind your strong product acceptance?
NICE Actimize is a leader in financial crime, risk and compliance, and we have hundreds of clients in financial markets compliance, as well as areas like anti-money laundering, anti-fraud, case management and more. Financial crime & compliance is our sole focus and purpose.

NICE Actimize launched holistic surveillance ahead of the market several years ago, and still ranks above other holistic providers due to our industry leading products and expertise. Our complete solution includes communications surveillance honed from many years of trading floor experience which is a strength of our parent company, NICE, and which has brought yet another game changing capability to the market.

Do you have any new compliance products that are rolling out to the market?
This year we achieved substantial success and growth with a recent product launch – NICE Actimize launched its next-generation Actimize Cross-Asset Cloud Markets Surveillance solution, which also featured both Foreign Exchange (FX) and Case Management capabilities. The solution provides wide coverage for foreign exchange, equities, fixed income, futures and options in a cloud environment or hybrid, and meets the unique compliance needs and regulatory requirements of both buy-side and sell-side firms.

Leveraging NICE Actimize’s more than 12 years of experience with OTC instruments, the Cloud Markets Surveillance solution provides a comprehensive package of surveillance models that enable global regulatory compliance across products and markets. The solution’s proven analytic capabilities offer fully automated surveillance and end-to-end workflow management, investigation, audit, and reporting/dashboard capabilities.

In the year ahead, we have significant plans to introduce additional capabilities in our Holistic Surveillance portfolio as well as advanced analytics and machine learning.

Where do you see your markets compliance solutions heading?
The NICE Actimize Financial Markets Compliance line of business continues to add new clients at an accelerated rate. We expect that market and regulatory forces, together with our commitment to innovating market surveillance, will continue to drive our financial markets compliance business in the future.

NICE Actimize intends to help its customers in this challenging environment by continuing to set the standard for the market surveillance process. This includes a shift from exception management to profiling, and predictive analytics, as well as holistic surveillance (integrated trade and market surveillance) so that firms can practice proactive, preventative compliance (as opposed to being reactive and event-driven). This will enable firms to show regulators evidence of effective risk controls and best practice, and be globally consistent.

We expect to see significant demand across the sell-side and buy-side, and all institution tiers. In addition, Tier 1 broker dealers will lead the way adopting holistic surveillance, as the buy-side – traditional asset managers and hedge funds – works to transform its culture and assumes responsibility for holistic and market surveillance. We will also see the adoption of holistic surveillance as it spreads into the Tier 2 broker dealers and more pervasively across into the buy side. Another trend is that retail compliance will begin to incorporate holistic surveillance into its sales practices and suitability approach.

“Market and regulatory forces, and our commitment to innovating market surveillance, will continue to drive our financial markets compliance business in the future.”

Meet Financial Markets Compliance GM Puja Agrawal

Puja Agrawal – NICE Actimize, VP & General Manager, Financial Markets Compliance Solutions: Puja Agrawal leads Actimize’s Financial Markets Compliance line of business and is responsible for leading the LOB’s vision, strategy, product innovation, go-to-market, and client relationship management. Ms. Agrawal is a veteran in enterprise software with over a decade of experience in compliance, working with the largest financial institutions around the globe.

Previously, Ms. Agrawal held the positions of Managing Director for Financial Markets Compliance and Strategic Accounts Management where she played an instrumental role in Actimize’s growth. Prior to Actimize, Ms. Agrawal specialized in Information Management, Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing at firms like Computer Associates and Sterling Software.