Ancoa, provider of contextual surveillance and insightful analytics for exchanges, regulators, buy & sell-side firms, today announced that Dinosaur Merchant Bank Limited has deployed Ancoa’s surveillance platform to monitor their equity trading activity for instances of market abuse and to meet their obligations under MAR (Market Abuse Regulation). Dinosaur Merchant Bank Limited combines global investment banking and advisory services, a full-service institutional brokerage and investment advisor services.

The rollout of MAR in July 2016 requires financial institutions to monitor trading activity for instances of market abuse. In line with MAR and for the first time, market surveillance platforms chosen by market participants must capture orders (including those that do not proceed to execution) as the existing obligation to report Suspicious Transactions (STRs) has been extended to include Suspicious Transaction and Order Reports (STOR).

Dinosaur Merchant Bank Limited has selected Ancoa’s surveillance platform to enable automated monitoring of all their equity trading activity in line with MAR.  Ancoa takes an alternative approach to market surveillance overlaying multiple different data sources to deliver a contextual view enabling firm's to spot market abuse or potential market manipulation and reduce false positives as well as blind spots.  Ancoa's contextual approach reconciles siloed data sets, from trading data to electronic communications, financial news and social media channels in order to construct a comprehensive picture of trading activity.  Ancoa can be deployed across all asset classes in all jurisdictions.  Only by having this contextual view, can Dinosaur Merchant Bank Limited investigate suspicious transactions or orders, and report them to regulators.  

Philip Green, Sales Trader, Dinosaur Merchant Bank Limited, said: “We carried out a thorough review of surveillance capabilities in the marketplace and chose to partner with Ancoa because their platform offers a more complete solution not only for our current but also our future needs.  Furthermore, we found the platform easy to use both in the front office and by our compliance teams, ensuring we have one platform upon which to track and report any potential instances of market abuse as appropriate.”  

Stefan Hendrickx, Founder and Executive Director,  Ancoa, added: “We are delighted to provide our surveillance capabilities to Dinosaur Merchant Bank Limited and help them achieve MAR compliance. Our teams collaborated throughout the process to ensure that monitoring parameters and alerts were systematically reviewed and calibrated in line with Dinosaur Merchant Bank Limited’s surveillance requirements under MAR.  We look forward to developing our relationship with both the business and compliance teams in the future.”