Following the recent announcement of our strategic alliance with global trade and markets surveillance leader Eventus Systems, we took a deeper look into how the partnership will help shape the idea of holistic surveillance and the future of markets surveillance as a whole. Scroll down to read the highlights.
Or watch the debate in full:
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Travis Schwab (Eventus Systems CEO) and Oliver Blower (VoxSmart CEO) shared the stage in a quick fire debate on the market’s latest challenges facing compliance and surveillance teams, not to mention how our recent partnership aims to shape the future of market surveillance globally.
Holistic Surveillance doesn’t exist (yet)
The word holistic has been whispered in the corridors of financial institutions and fintechs alike for years, if not decades but the reality is that the industry still isn’t there yet – that was the conclusion our CEOs made after today’s discussion.
One of the barriers to this is data. It’s everywhere, it’s unorganised and, more importantly, each data point must be captured and normalised before being able to give a firm useful insights.Oliver comments that “transactional data is only one side of the story and in fact, communications data is some of the most context-rich data a business will ever find“.
Oliver’s view is that the industry needs to focus on building strong foundations before focusing on the floors above. “Surveillance is a journey, not a destination and I love the idea that one day we’ll get to a place where one vendor can help firms manage all of their communications and trade risk, I just don’t think we’re there yet.” He goes on to say that we have to recognise that in order to build a solid house, you have to have solid foundations and those foundations are made of aggregated and normalised data from both sides of your business: trading and communications.
Travis echoes how vital the bigger picture is to ensure you understand your business and the risks it faces and it takes experts to really understand those problems well. “We are experts in trade surveillance and market risk because they are hard problems to tackle and so we do that extremely well, but, in order for you to have that holistic view, you need to talk to other experts, such as VoxSmart in the comms Surveillance space.”
Marrying these worlds together by working with domain experts in each field is the approach VoxSmart and Eventus Systems are opting for. The goal is to have a really good solution across all the different functional areas of surveillance. Bringing in different domain experts in the various surveillance fields and having them integrate and talk to each other will be what will help firms gain an added level of insight. One company that can deliver it all doesn’t exist yet.
The black swan of 2020, perhaps our careers
Travis and Oliver go on to discuss how the recent pandemic has really encouraged markets practitioners to think about disaster recovery and business continuity in a completely different way. The new environment business are operating in is transforming not only their technology but their business practices, people management and culture.
Gone are the days of having replica offices and recovery sites 30 miles down the road because the risks have changed and that solution is no longer possible when nobody can leave their house. Businesses are going to consider these risks going forward.
Still Interested? Watch the debate in full.
About the speakers:
Travis Schwab | CEO at Eventus Systems, global leader in trade and markets surveillance.
Travis Schwab is CEO of Austin-based Eventus Systems, Inc., a multi-award-winning global provider of trade surveillance and market risk solutions for financial institutions. For over 25 years, Travis has served in chief executive, compliance, sales and financial technology roles across the front, middle and back offices at a diverse set of organizations. Before founding Eventus, Travis was the CEO and Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) of RGM Securities, the broker-dealer subsidiary of one of the largest proprietary trading firms in the U.S. before its 2017 acquisition by DRW. Before RGM, he was Managing Director of Global Buyside Sales and CCO at Trading Technologies. Previously, Travis was Co-Head of North American eBrokerage Sales at Calyon Financial (currently Societe Generale). Earlier in his career, Travis had management roles at NYFIX, Inc. (currently Itiviti) and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (now CME Group).
He earned a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in Finance from Loyola University in Chicago.
Visit Travis’s LinkedIn profile
Oliver Blower | VoxSmart CEO
Oliver Blower is CEO at leading Communications Surveillance provider VoxSmart. Oliver leads a highly experienced senior leadership team focused on delivering VoxSmart’s vision to define how capital markets participants see their communications data and lead innovation in driving enterprise efficiencies in heavily regulated industries. He has accrued nearly 20 years of global markets experience leading pioneering B2B SaaS technology development across Mobile Voice, WhatsApp & WeChat Capture and multiple M&A transactions to facilitate growth and market consolidation. Oliver is a recognised global ambassador of FinTech and can often be heard reminding people that he remembers when ‘FinTech’ used to be referred to as ‘Selling software to banks’. Visit Oliver”s LinkedIn profile
About Eventus Systems
Eventus Systems is a leading global provider of multi-asset class trade surveillance and market risk solutions. Its powerful, award-winning Validus platform is easy to deploy, customize and operate across equities, options, futures, foreign exchange (FX), fixed income and digital asset markets. Validus is proven in the most complex, high-volume and real-time environments of tier-1 banks, brokerages, futures commission merchants (FCMs), clearing firms, trading firms, market centers, buy-side institutions and corporates. The company’s rapidly growing client base of more than 60 firms relies on Validus and Eventus’ responsive support and product development teams to overcome its most pressing regulatory challenges. For more, visit www.eventussystems.com.
About VoxSmart
VoxSmart is a leader in communications surveillance and mobile capture technology for global financial markets participants. VoxSmart’s suite of communications surveillance products allows firms to communicate, trade and work in a compliant manner to effectively mitigate financial risk and achieve competitive advantage in heavily regulated markets. Visit www.voxsmart.com.