This month’s edition of The Monitor is packed with timely insights and updates to help you stay ahead of the evolving market landscape.
Inside, we cover key developments including the rise of 24/5 trading, market manipulation risks in low-volume securities, what’s on our regulatory radar, and what’s new at Trillium Surveyor to help firms be proactive, not reactive, in managing risk and compliance in today’s fast-moving markets.
May has been another very busy month for the finance industry in the U.S., Europe, and beyond, and thus very busy for the world of trade surveillance. It’s also been a significant month for team Surveyor. We’ve announced industry-first 24/5 trade surveillance coverage in partnership with Blue Ocean Technologies, and got nominated in three categories for The Waters Rankings 2025 for Best Data Analytics Provider, Best Market Surveillance Provider, and Best Reporting System Provider.
We’ve also showcased our trade surveillance and best execution products in Europe, in style at TradeTech Paris, and had the privilege of attending FINRA’s Annual Conference — continuing to stay close to regulatory priorities and innovations shaping the future of compliance.
In this edition, you’ll find more details about these exciting milestones, key event need-to-know highlights, plus a sneak peek into the upcoming release of our enhanced Best Execution product.
– Lisa Balter Saacks, President at Trillium Surveyor
Trading Newsbeat
Increased Push for 24/5 Trading
We are seeing an increased push for 24/5 trading in the U.S. and other countries as broker-dealers race to evolve toward a continuous market. Major players like Charles Schwab, Robinhood, our strategic partner Blue Ocean Technologies, and Nasdaq are investing in extended-hours access and reshaping expectations for always-on trading.
For institutions, these expanded sessions open the door to more active overnight strategies and greater alignment with foreign markets, creating new profit opportunities. Longer hours invariably mean more risk. We’re seeing bad actors exploit extended trading hours through tactics like ‘spread locking,’ which refers to taking advantage of wider spreads and lower volume times to gain an unfair advantage in the market. Further, some firms are also dealing with a general lack of information and visibility into the financials for certain opportunities available in overnight trading, particularly in the area of low-volume securities. These heightened compliance risks make surveillance and robust regulatory oversight more critical than ever.
Market Manipulation in Low-Volume Securities
The recent increase in trading activity for low volume securities has led to increases in market manipulation, since small trades can significantly impact prices.
Sometimes this can even involve ‘account-takeovers’ — the hacking or hijacking of multiple accounts from firms for low-volume security trades, specifically with the intention of artificially inflating prices. Some of these attacks have involved groups of up to ten different accounts, all conducting these low volume trades.
However, these issues can be detected with post-trade surveillance. With Surveyor’s Trade Surveillance software, for example, trades are continually monitored, and custom filters allow teams to flag low-volume security trades that meet their risk parameters for faster, targeted oversight. In addition, our ‘Trends’ functionality provides a high-level view of accounts generating the most alerts, displayed as a histogram and table to help teams identify emerging patterns without relying solely on individual alerts.
Regulatory Radar
New SEC Rule 605 Impacts More Firms
Starting December 2025, broker-dealers with 100,000+ customer accounts will be subject to SEC Rule 605, expanding the rule’s reach beyond market centers to firms like Firstrade, which may not have previously focused on execution transparency (finra.org). Thankfully, Surveyor Best Ex is ideally suited to helping vendors and traders review and analyze their data and amend their metrics before the deadline.
New FINRA Rule to Make Execution Data Public
The proposed FINRA Rule SR-FINRA-2025-002 will require firms subject to SEC Rule 605 to submit order execution reports for NMS stocks directly to FINRA, which will publish the data on its website. This will centralize broker-dealer execution data, making peer comparisons easier and more visible to regulators, clients, and competitors (finra.org).
Trillium Surveyor Delivers Industry-First 24/5 Trade Surveillance Coverage
Surveyor has officially become the first trade surveillance provider to offer 24/5 coverage, thanks to our new strategic partnership with Blue Ocean Technologies.
By integrating Blue Ocean’s overnight NMS ATS trade data into our Trade Surveillance platform, our clients will be empowered to maintain the same level of regulatory and surveillance coverage across Blue Ocean’s extended sessions as they do during regular market hours, removing gaps in oversight.
As a capital markets fintech leader in global trading and data, Blue Ocean is perfectly positioned to help us provide firms with round-the-clock trade surveillance.
Our clients will thus be able to seamlessly monitor trading activity that occurs during Blue Ocean’s late sessions (8:00pm – 4:00am ET, Sunday – Thursday).
Products and Services: Countdown to Best Execution
Surveyor Best Ex is undergoing major enhancements to equip investment firms with new tools to reduce trading costs, mitigate regulatory risk, and optimize performance across all asset classes. We’re gearing up to release in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for an official announcement date from us in the near future!
Our Social Calendar
May has been another busy month for our team’s social calendar, and we’ve had some excellent opportunities to engage with regulators, risk, and compliance teams at large.
We had a great time attending the 2025 FINRA Annual Conference connecting with peers, hearing directly from FINRA staff, and digging into the most pressing regulatory and compliance topics shaping the future for member firms. Some key topics from this:
- Municipal bonds are spiking, with FINRA flagging their growing volatility, and highlighting rule compliance. Firms should assess whether their fixed income surveillance can scale, as manual oversight is no longer sufficient.
- FINRA drew attention to sophisticated manipulation tactics exploiting monitoring gaps, such as account takeovers during low-liquidity trading hours, API trades that bypass pre-trade controls, and ramp and dump strategies used in small caps, options, and OTC securities.
- Third-party and fourth-party risk is a priority, with expectations around the vendor of vendors increasing. Thus, firms should prepare to demonstrate documented vendor oversight.
- AI’s utility for investor complaint summarization to internal document processing was discussed, but concerns remain around bias, hallucinations, and privacy.
- While crypto market regulation is still very much in the works behind the scenes, it was not discussed heavily by FINRA at the conference.
Our team also flew to Paris to attend TradeTech Europe, where we had great meetings with Kaiko as we continue expanding our crypto market trade surveillance offering in Europe—and soon, in the U.S. as well. We also co-hosted a dinner with Kaiko for our growing European network.
We discussed the looming October deadline for the transition to a T+1 settlement cycle for securities. According to TradeTech’s snap polls, we learned that 42% of European firms plan on investing more in best ex analytics this year and that post‑trade analytics integration has jumped to the #2 automation priority for desks over the next 12 months. European traders know that MiFID II compliance isn’t enough, and that firms need to leverage analytics built for today’s market.
Looking ahead to June, Surveyor is also excited to attend the Women in Digital Asset Forum. Here, we hope to discuss some of the unique challenges that women encounter in the world of trading and compliance, as well as the new regulations emerging for crypto and other digital assets.
