By Melissa Watras, Director of Product
Product Perspective
As someone who oversees product, people ask me all the time: “what’s next?” What market, asset class, data problem are we solving for? The most interesting questions right now are not just what’s happening next, but also how fast everything is changing at once.
Prediction markets keep growing; trading hours are expanding; and firms are dealing with a lot more activity across a broader set of products and venues, often without oversight infrastructure to match.
What I keep hearing from clients and market participants is that the challenge has shifted. It is no longer just about identifying activity. It’s about giving teams the context they need to make good decisions quickly, across oversight and analytics workflows.
That theme shaped much of our product focus this quarter.
Adapting Oversight
The growth of prediction markets has generated a lot of industry discussion this year, and for good reason. While the risks feel familiar, the products are different. These products introduce new participation models, new behaviors, and new supervisory considerations that don’t always fit neatly into existing oversight frameworks designed for traditional securities markets.
The rules haven’t fully caught up yet. It’s not a criticism, but a reality of how fast these markets are moving. So we are building ahead, which means thinking carefully about how existing frameworks should evolve while waiting for answers.
That thinking influenced several of our recent enhancements, including expanded prediction market coverage and the introduction of our Prior Knowledge Signal, which addresses one of the most important questions emerging in event-driven markets: how does a firm know if someone traded ahead of a significant event because they know something? These are the questions CCOs and Compliance organizations are being asked to answer.
Identifying what Matters
As activity expands across products, venues, and trading sessions, the alert problem gets harder. Clients need confidence that when something surfaces, it actually warrants a look.
This quarter, we enhanced spoofing detection designed to better distinguish legitimate market making activity from potentially manipulative behavior, expanded odd-lot monitoring capabilities, and added parameter backtesting tools that allow firms to evaluate alert impact before deploying changes.
Together, these help firms improve signal quality, adapt surveillance programs with greater confidence, and focus resources where they can have the greatest impact.
It Starts with the Data
The data is the foundation and for a lot of firms, the data is still Frankenstein. Timestamps mismatch, formats are all over the place, and a firm can’t point to a single source of truth. While this is not a new problem, AI is making solving for this more urgent. Intelligent systems need consistent inputs.
Surveillance, best execution, investigations, reporting, and other trade lifecycle analytics often rely on the same underlying activity. When that data is clean, normalized, and accessible, firms can adapt more easily to changing oversight requirements while getting more value from the data they already have.
This quarter, that focus led to enhancements such as Surveyor Connect, expanded metadata capabilities, and additional support for downstream integrations, all designed to make normalized data easier to use across the trade lifecycle.
As markets continue to evolve, the firms with the cleanest data are going to get the most out of AI driven oversight and that’s what we are helping clients build towards.
What We’re Watching
As we look ahead, we’re focused on helping firms adapt to changing market structures without adding complexity, improve the precision of their oversight programs, and make better use of their data across surveillance, best execution, and trade lifecycle analytics.
The firms that navigate this period well won’t necessarily be the biggest or best resourced, but they will be able to move faster by tuning their programs confidently while waiting for industry answers. That’s the kind of firm we are building for.
If you’d like to discuss any of these updates or share feedback with our product team, please reach out or contact us here, we’d welcome the conversation (even if you disagree!).