RIMES, the leading provider of managed data services for the buy-side, is today announcing the launch of RegFocus, the first buy-side monitoring and detection solution for the Market Abuse Regulation (MAR). It is designed to meet regulatory obligations under MAR and many other surveillance regulations, reducing buy-side firms’ risk of insider dealing and market manipulation.

MAR, which came into force in July this year, greatly increases the compliance burden and associated costs for asset management firms. Firms can no longer rely on the control provided by their brokers and must instead operate compliance policies to identify and control market abuse.

RegFocus uses powerful algorithms and analytics to deliver buy-side compliance teams a comprehensive review of all trading activity. It monitors and detects behaviour across multiple exchanges and asset classes, including ETFs, benchmarks, indices and portfolio rebalancing activities. With RIMES’ new fully-managed solution, compliance officers are given an overarching view of all MAR regulatory obligations so that they can act quickly and confidently.

RIMES has appointed Jeremy Garland as Head of Compliance to lead the RegFocus team. Jeremy brings nearly 20 years’ compliance experience, most recently as Global Head of Monitoring & Surveillance at Macquarie Group. Jeremy, who has also held senior compliance positions at Nomura and Merill Lynch, reports to Bruno Piers de Raveschoot, COO of RIMES’ Compliance Division.

“RegFocus is the first, fully managed and hosted MAR solution that has been developed specifically for the buy-side. It has been built by compliance officers, for compliance officers as we acutely understand the current and future regulatory pressures they face. RIMES’ library of powerful detection models ensures that firms can keep pace with regulatory and technology change, supporting their investment activity with a broad-coverage compliance solution,” says Jeremy Garland.

“Fund management firms are facing very specific issues with the new MAR EU 596/2014. The complexity of the data and the entity level for monitoring is very different than for the sell-side, and the reasons for market abuse are not the same. The way portfolio managers are measured impacts the risk of manipulation. A typical sell-side solution will not apply for that industry, which is why we developed a solution specifically for the buy-side.” Says Bruno Piers de Raveschoot.

RegFocus, which builds on the success of the award-winning RIMES Managed Data Services, removes the burden of data management, by:

• Solving compliance teams’ challenge to collect, standardise and analyse a range of different data structures and formats against the market and other reference data for cases of potential market manipulation or insider dealing;
• Translating regulatory guidelines and rules governing trading conduct into alerts to identify potentially abusive trades and orders behavior accurately and early;
• Accommodating single order or trade, basket and portfolio monitoring and being able to be tailored to suit individual roles and management hierarchies;
• Being fully customisable to existing systems to avoid any operational disruption or interference;
• Being future-proofed for changes in regulatory requirements, including technical enforcement.

This is particularly relevant with the expected implementation of the EU benchmark regulation and MiFID II in the coming months.