ACA Compliance Group (ACA), a leading provider of governance, risk, and compliance advisory services and technology solutions, today announced enhancements to ACA’s trade blotter review analysis offering. Available today, this new automated trade blotter review tool is designed in response to challenges faced by SEC-registered investment adviser clients in keeping pace with the SEC’s enhanced use of technology to detect insider trading, market abuse, and other potential misconduct.

Since the OCIE’s release of the National Exam Analytics Tool (NEAT) in 2014, ACA has observed an increase in the amount and depth of trading data requested prior to exams, including requests for up to five years of trading activity and more than 40 trade blotter fields – a sharp increase from the 13-14 fields previously required. Given the quick turnaround time for such requests – typically only two weeks – and the SEC’s recently adopted template format for collecting requested trade data, SEC exams are becoming increasingly complex and burdensome.

In response to these challenges, ACA developed an automated trade blotter review tool that incorporates a select set of algorithms from ACA’s Decryptex® surveillance technology. ACA’s compliance consulting team uses the tool to automate reviews of clients’ trading activities during mock SEC examinations and compliance program reviews. The tool replaces ACA’s previously manual processes for reviewing clients’ liquid trading activities and more closely aligns with the SEC’s enhanced use of technology in this area.

Benefits and improvements of ACA’s enhanced trade blotter review analysis include:

• Closer alignment of ACA’s processes with the SEC’s use of technology
• Automates and enhances ACA’s current trading tests and includes new review points using proven Decryptex technology
• Reduces false positives and increases the accuracy of results through the identification of potential “items of interest”
• Provides the ability to digest large amounts of trading activity, ensuring comprehensive analysis (versus sampling) of your firm’s trading and investment activities
• Enhances reporting of potential “items of interest” identified by the analysis
• Includes eight all new and many enhanced testing points

“We are excited to significantly enhance ACA’s trade blotter review capabilities through the incorporation of select Decryptex surveillance algorithms,” said Nikolay Kojuharov, Partner at ACA Technology Solutions. “By automating the review process, our team can identify potential items of interest more quickly and accurately.”

Ted Eichenlaub, Partner at ACA Compliance Group, said, “Through combining ACA’s technology with our compliance and surveillance expertise, we continue to align our processes with regulators’ priorities and enhance our internal review processes to provide superior service for our clients.”