Trade and exchange monitoring refers to the systematic observation and analysis of trade and exchange activities in a financial institution to ensure the speed and accuracy of market trades on your network, ensure compliance with regulations, and identify infrastructure or supplier degradations that may result in costly issues with your financial transactions. In other words, it's a way of keeping a close eye on buying and selling activities to make sure everything is running smoothly and fairly.
Trade monitoring involves these components and features:
Trade and exchange monitoring solutions are essential for a range of businesses and organizations, including financial institutions like banks, investment firms, and brokerages that rely on real-time monitoring of trading platforms; stock exchanges and trading venues that need to ensure market integrity and prevent fraud; cryptocurrency exchanges that safeguard against cyber threats and adhere to anti-money laundering regulations; regulatory bodies and compliance organizations that oversee trading activities to enforce market rules; payment processors and FinTech companies that ensure payment processing integrity; and large corporations with in-house trading desks, such as energy companies, multinational corporations, and hedge funds, which use these solutions to optimize trading strategies and reduce risk exposure.
By using trade and exchange monitoring solutions, these organizations can safeguard their infrastructure, optimize performance, and ensure compliance with industry regulations, which are critical for maintaining trust and operational efficiency.
Initially, trade monitoring tools were mainly focused on helping businesses meet regulatory requirements and prevent fraud. Over the years, these solutions have grown to cover a lot more ground, like boosting trading performance, detecting infrastructure problems, and making sure external partners are reliable. Today, financial market feeds, trading infrastructures, and investment banks rely on these tools to keep their trading and operating environments secure, fast, and efficient. By keeping a close eye on buying and selling activities, they can quickly catch any unusual patterns, reduce risks, and avoid costly interruptions. This shift has been driven by stricter regulations and the ultra-competitive environment of high-speed trading, pushing companies to adopt advanced technologies for real-time monitoring and automated alerts. These tools can give companies a cutting edge in terms of compliance, infrastructure integrity, and speed – all crucial factors in a marketplace where milliseconds can mean the difference between monumental success and abysmal failure.
While trade and exchange monitoring is an essential component of market operations that organizations rely on to ensure the speed and accuracy of their market transactions, there are significant challenges to doing this effectively, including:
Let's look at how NIKSUN solves all these challenges for trade monitoring.
Problem: As the trade dataset grows increasingly vast and complex, monitoring all the components can be overwhelming.
Solution: NIKSUN's network-to-application platform makes trade monitoring at any scale a breeze. Drawing data from every component in your infrastructure, in any format (packets, logs, SNMP, flows, metrics, etc.), and operating seamlessly in every environment (on prem, cloud, virtual, or hybrid), NIKSUN's solution provides a single pane of glass for everyone in your organization to view highly usable, drillable dashboards that are easy to alarm on and customize. Dashboards are built automatically from your raw data, so there's no human error or bias. Plus, NIKSUN's zero-loss data capture and warehousing technology ensures all the data is ingested and accounted for from every source type, without a single dropped packet or other data type. The result: end-to-end performance monitoring from trade execution to real-time exchange with the ability to easily zoom in on packet-level details. And NIKSUN's platform is designed for the most demanding trading networks – supporting data rates exceeding 100 Gbps (clusterable to multi-Tbps). What's more, NIKSUN's one-stop solution goes well beyond trade monitoring to deliver intelligence for any monitoring, performance, availability, and security use case you can imagine.
Problem: When it comes to trading, challenges like poor feed data, network slowdowns, and application issues can mean the difference between high-stakes success and failure.
Solution: NIKSUN solves this problem by analyzing global, high-speed Market Data feeds in real-time, going well beyond traditional solutions that detect multicast gaps and present basic analytics. Using advanced algorithms, NIKSUN performs deep analysis of feed behavior and helps you locate outliers that define the quality of the incoming data. What's more, NIKSUN continuously monitors the Market Data Distribution from third-party vendors to detect and alert on data loss, sequence gaps, outliers, price errors (including zero price), retransmits, and abnormally high traffic volumes over microsecond timeframes. And NIKSUN correlates application layer analytics with network statistics for fast and accurate detection of bottlenecks and other causes of latency. From all of this, NIKSUN's tick-to-trade solution generates rich executive reports that allow you to visualize the complete story and drill down on specifics.
Problem: Keeping up with changing regulatory requirements can be confusing and tie up resources.
Solution: NIKSUN solves this problem by identifying, tracking, and organizing your compliance requirements, allowing you to stay on top of mandates without having to dedicate team members to this labor-intensive process. NIKSUN's intuitive dashboards allow you to access a full audit trail for your organization and easily find the details you need. Independent and long-term storage of accurately timestamped transactions, to the nanosecond level, enable auditing, trending, and planning. Event categories, such as password and data changes, deleted objects, special access privileges, cleared audit logs, and more, mean you can assess your compliance posture instantly, and color coding makes it easy to see if you're on target or need to pay closer attention. Plus, you'll get alerted to non-compliant incidents, so you can follow up right away.
Problem: Trade monitoring can throw a lot of false positives, distracting from legitimate issues.
Solution: NIKSUN's real time alarming is consistently robust, alerting you to actual incidents across all domains (Trade and Exchange Monitoring, Market Data Analytics, Network Performance Management – NPM, Application Performance Management – APM, Cybersecurity, Compliance, etc.) so you don't waste valuable resources. With NIKSUN, you can get exactly the notification setup you need: choose from out-of-box configurations or easily create custom alarms to cover every possible use case. And NIKSUN offers a multitude of filters and drill-down options, so that once you learn about a problem, you can get to the root cause right away and reduce your Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR).
Problem: It costs an arm and a leg to achieve effective real-time monitoring.
Solution: NIKSUN makes it practical and affordable to monitor your entire infrastructure from one place with 100% awareness and visibility, and no blind spots – no matter what size your business is. NIKSUN's solution sets up in minutes with a few clicks, offers instant intelligence, and is easy to use and understand, no special expertise required. Affordable from the start, our one-stop solution has also proven extremely cost-effective over time. NIKSUN implementations have saved large enterprises tens to hundreds of millions of dollars by significantly reducing their operating expenses through the consolidation of multiple point solutions with high integration, product, maintenance, and operational costs. For small businesses, the NIKSUN platform has enabled them to apply the same technology that secures the U.S. Department of Defense, but without breaking the bank. Because NIKSUN's platform is designed for extreme scalability, we can work with any volume of data, with flexibility to budget for exactly what you need.
Problem: Because threats evolve, monitoring tools must evolve, too.
Solution: NIKSUN's in-house teams work constantly to keep NIKSUN threat lists current, with experts updating threat intelligence and fraud detection policies to make sure we uncover new threat actors and keep our lists up-to-date, relevant, and accurate. NIKSUN's platform also allows third-party feeds to be run against its own database. Our rapid development model is responsive, incorporating your feedback in the platform builds. And NIKSUN's solution grows with your business, allowing you to scale to multi-Tbps and 10s of PBs without ripping-and-replacing.
NIKSUN is the recognized world leader in empowering organizations to Know the Unknown®. Since 1997, we have been committed to delivering the most innovative solutions for securing and optimizing the networks of over a thousand customers including Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and service providers.
Our industry leading suite of scalable, forensics-based cyber security and network performance monitoring products provide customers with in-depth and actionable insight into security threats, performance issues, and compliance risks. NIKSUN's patented real-time analysis and recording technology is the industry's most comprehensive solution for securing and maintaining dynamic network infrastructure.