Market Surveillance Prototype to Support Financial Decision-making
b-next said that it has developed a market surveillance prototype within the EU-Project FIRST consortium, which offers the functionality for analysing the impact of Twitter, blogs and other social media channels. FIRST is the acronym for large scale inFormation extraction and Integration InfRastructure for SupporTing financial decision making, a three-year project established in October 2010, which b-next says harnesses knowledge on the web to support financial decision-makers. The prototype paves the way for analysis of social media sentiment within financial markets in real time.
b-next, a developer of market abuse surveillance, insider dealing and compliance software, added that it has been developing technology to monitor market surveillance through social channels, working with use case partners Monte dei Paschi, Interactive Data and several universities. The consortium presented the first version of its prototype system at the Associazione Bancaria Italiana (ABI) Lab conference in Milan at the end of March, where financial industry professionals welcomed a decision support model based on web sentiment.
The company adds that its technologists have built in the functionality to detect scenarios of financial market abuse, such as attempts to manipulate prices of financial instruments through the release of false information. The prototype, which will be available by the end of September, marks the initial step towards enhancing state-of-the-art tools of market supervision and financial market regulation. A final prototype is scheduled for release by the end of the FIRST project in September 2013.
“This project is about using unstructured information to generate patterns which can further enhance the user’s overview of the market,” said b-next’s chief executive officer (CEO), Wolfgang Fabisch. “In today’s world of rapidly changing and evolving financial markets, the sentiment of market participants can be tremendously valuable to detect and predict market events.
“Recent news has made it clear that colleagues communicate their knowledge and opinion via email, chat rooms and forums. As channels of communication continue to expand it is very possible that sensitive information could also be communicated via social mediums. We are pleased to be engaging with a group of intelligent and innovative professionals on a project which could have significant impact on the banking industry.”