Integrated platforms aren’t just about compliance - they’re helping firms move faster, cut risk and outperform competitors.
By Lisa Balter Saacks, President, Trillium Surveyor, with editorial support from Annie Granatstein of Galvanize Storytelling
Market stress exposes weak links
When markets whipsawed in early April 2025, several broker-dealers saw outages that left oversight and execution systems struggling to keep pace. One platform froze mid-sell-off, while another’s surveillance alerts stalled for hours, slowing compliance reviews and creating oversight gaps. These disruptions left firms exposed to financial penalties and reputational damage by creating blind spots in trade data and delaying surveillance reviews. In fragmented environments, a single failure can quickly ripple across desks, compounding operational and regulatory risk.
Regulators underscored these vulnerabilities with a wave of recent enforcement actions, highlighting the fragility of many institutions’ infrastructures.
Firms relying on siloed platforms face the greatest exposure, including delayed trade surveillance and gaps in oversight during periods of market stress. Integrated systems that unify surveillance and best execution analytics provide clearer visibility across the trade cycle; disconnected platforms, by contrast, magnify disruption.
The rising bar for oversight
April’s turbulence wasn’t an isolated glitch. It highlighted operational stress points across the industry’s infrastructure. Volatility alone would have rattled markets, but regulatory scrutiny was already intensifying. A wave of enforcement actions underscored the trend along with the SEC’s amendments to Rule 605, set to take effect in August 2026, which will require far more detailed reporting on execution quality.
Firms relying on disconnected surveillance and execution analytics platforms risk not only compliance gaps but slower insights, increased manual handoffs, and missed operational efficiencies and alpha generation. The convergence of volatility, rising regulatory pressure, and a trading day that increasingly stretches beyond normal hours is prompting firms to rethink their approach. Legacy and current systems built in silos — one for surveillance, another for best execution analytics — slow teams down and leave value on the table. The solution gaining traction and providing a competitive edge: unifying the two.
Stress testing the system
Market volatility, like the events in April, continually tests the resilience of oversight systems. Disconnected platforms can leave trading and compliance teams unable to assess their positions quickly and delay surveillance alerts, creating temporary blind spots. Reporting teams may struggle to piece together incomplete data, slowing filings and increasing exposure to regulatory penalties.
And the stress doesn’t stop at the close. After-hours trading and thinly traded securities invite spoofing and layering. Liquidity becomes more uneven, spreads widen and manipulative tactics get harder to identify. That risk only grows as markets continue to welcome 24/5 trading and inch closer to a 24/7 cycle.
Running trade data through both surveillance and best execution analytics provides added perspective, helping teams spot patterns, prioritize follow-ups and maintain a clearer picture across the trade cycle.
“Firms need to rethink their alerting logic for extended sessions if they want to catch problems before they escalate,” said Melissa Watras, Director of Product for Trillium Surveyor. Watras added that overnight thresholds can’t mirror daytime logic. Without adjustments, patterns that look like harmless noise during the day can disguise misconduct at night.
Under the regulator’s lens
In late 2024, one U.S. broker-dealer agreed to pay more than $20 million to settle spoofing charges in the Treasuries market, according to Reuters. Smaller shops were also fined for missing signs of layering and wash trades — proof that regulators are widening their reach beyond Wall Street’s largest players. Eversheds-Sutherland found in its 2024 FINRA Sanctions Study that disciplinary actions jumped 22% in a year, climbing to 552 cases from 453 the year before.
That momentum is set to continue. In August 2026, the SEC’s amendments to Rule 605 will take effect. Brokers and venues will be expected to publish far more detail on execution quality, from speed to price improvement to routing, broken down by order type, size and venue. That transparency won’t just satisfy regulators; it will put performance data in the public domain, where clients and competitors can make side-by-side comparisons.
At the same time, regulators are pushing firms to prove that trading performance is optimized, not just compliant — adding new reporting requirements on already stretched trading and compliance teams.
More than a compliance problem
On the surface, the challenge looks regulatory. Rule 605’s expanded requirements will require compliance teams to provide evidence that trades were monitored and that execution quality held up across measurable dimensions.
But the stakes are broader. Siloed systems can leave firms exposed to compliance gaps and make it harder to identify patterns across trading activity. Manual data validation and cross-checks stretch what should take minutes into days. Committees pore over spreadsheets, slowing decisions and increasing the risk of error. Audit trails become patchy, and when regulators ask for documentation, teams scramble to produce a defensible record.
Integrating surveillance and best execution analytics on one platform enhances the value of both: surveillance alerts become easier to contextualize alongside execution data, while execution insights can be viewed through the lens of compliance signals. Together they provide a more complete view across the trade cycle for both traders and compliance.
When silos break down
Surveillance and execution have long operated in separate silos with their own systems and workflows. That fragmentation slows reporting, creates oversight gaps and makes collaboration across departments harder. Without a shared view of the data, decisions are delayed, anomalies slip through in volatile periods, and compliance risks mount. That’s why more firms are looking to connect oversight and execution analytics in one place.
“Volatility and regulatory scrutiny are converging,” said Evan Brown, Trade Desk Manager, Trade Surveillance Manager & Best Execution Committee Chair, Firstrade. “Firms that can’t connect the dots quickly enough are falling behind.”
Turning oversight into intelligence
The payoff of unifying surveillance and execution analytics goes far beyond avoiding penalties. It delivers speed, resilience and sharper insight.
By bringing together data that was once kept in separate systems, unified platforms turn compliance from a defensive chore into a tool that supports smarter trading. Teams can switch between execution analytics and surveillance views and spot connections between order quality and trading patterns. This helps them make quicker decisions, focus on the most important issues, and respond more effectively. Daily insights let trading and compliance work together more smoothly, removing friction between teams and making oversight actionable.
When the two functions share a platform, weeks of manual prep shrink to minutes. Dashboards give trading desks intuitive insights during volatile swings. Broker-performance data points directly to which partners deliver the best prices and fastest fills.
“Having surveillance and best execution on the same platform lets us look at execution quality alongside market behavior more efficiently. That insight will influence how we adjust going forward, said Ann Cendejas, Chief Compliance Officer of Tickrs.”
The intelligence runs deeper. Execution reviews can uncover routing anomalies or venue concentration that suggest behavioral risks. Surveillance alerts can flag suspicious fills in volatile periods that might otherwise slip through. Viewing these two systems side by side allows teams to interpret alerts with greater context and make more informed decisions, ensuring compliance data informs risk management effectively.
Imagine a post-trade scenario during a volatile session. A trader notices unusually large slippage in several orders in the best execution view, while compliance sees multiple small, out-of-pattern orders flagged in the surveillance view. Because both sets of insights come from the same underlying trade data in a single platform, the team can connect the dots quickly: the unusual execution quality coincides with potential layering activity. Even post-trade, this allows traders and compliance to prioritize investigations, adjust internal controls and respond to regulators with a clear understanding of what happened.
By connecting data that once lived in silos, unified platforms flip compliance from a defensive obligation into a business tool. Firms can refine strategies, capture alpha and build long-term resilience.
The cost of waiting
Firms that delay modernization face potential enforcement gaps, reputational harm and lost performance opportunities. Consolidating data analytics in a single platform also frees senior staff from gathering and aligning information across multiple systems, time they can redirect to strategy.
In contrast, early adoption delivers measurable ROI, mitigates compliance fines and unlocks new trading opportunities. Those that move quickly are gaining a clearer, end-to-end view of trading activity and seeing faster compliance, stronger audit trails, sharper strategies and performance gains that flow directly to the bottom line.
“The market is changing faster than ever,” Brown said. “Firms that unify analytics aren’t just protecting themselves; they’re gaining an edge.”
Ready or not
What once looked optional is now table stakes.
Market shocks, regulatory updates and the shift toward round-the-clock trading are raising the bar. Firms clinging to siloed systems are being left behind. Integrated platforms aren’t just compliance insurance. They’re competitive infrastructure.
“The convergence of market volatility and increasing regulatory pressure is pushing unified trade analytics from a ‘nice-to-have’ to core infrastructure,” according to Brown. “Firms that fail to adapt quickly may find themselves outpaced by competitors who are already leveraging integrated systems to gain a competitive edge in both risk management and performance optimization.”
The central question is no longer whether firms will unify surveillance and execution — it’s how quickly they can modernize before the next market shock or regulatory wave.
About Trillium Surveyor
Discover how unified trade surveillance and best execution analytics are helping firms stay ahead of market and regulatory pressures. To learn more, visit https://trilliumsurveyor.com/.