Meeting the 72 Hour Trade-Reconstruction Rule – 10 Holistic Surveillance Leaders for 2025
When regulators rewrote the rulebook after the financial crisis, surveillance teams were handed an almost impossible brief: show us everything that led to a trade. In the United States, the CFTC’s Dodd-Frank swap-dealer rules (§1.35 and §23.202) imposed a 72-hour deadline to reconstruct a transaction, forcing banks to retrieve orders, voice calls, chat messages and e-mails as a single, coherent record.
Across the Atlantic, the UK and EU soon raised the bar again. Under Market Abuse Regulation and MiFID II, firms had to record “all communications … intended to result in a transaction” and prove they were monitoring every order and execution. The FCA’s Market Watch 51 made it clear that stitching these data sets together was no longer optional.
Early adopters quickly discovered that technology alone was not the limiting factor – data governance was. Many banks began by mining their voice-recording vaults and e-mail archives, only to find critical metadata such timestamps and trader IDs either missing or inconsistent, making it impossible to stitch conversations to specific orders.
That realisation triggered multimillion-dollar data-quality programmes – often costlier than the surveillance engines themselves. Firms also learned that regulators cared far more about coherent storylines than sheer alert volume: an investigator who could replay a chat snippet, the matching voice call and the precise order-book movements in a single view always earned lighter scrutiny than one drowning in false positives.
By 2018 “holistic” was no longer marketing slang but a benchmark in analyst reports. Those lessons, absorbed between 2014 and 2018, powered a burst of innovation as vendors and a new wave of start-ups delivered engines that correlated trade feeds with noisy voice and social traffic.
In this blog we review ten RegTech companies leading the field in holistic surveillance this year.
NICE Actimize – SURVEIL-X Holistic Conduct Surveillance
NICE pitches SURVEIL-X as the market’s first truly end-to-end conduct platform, unifying voice, chat, e-mail, social media and 300-plus market feeds inside a single cloud data lake. A patented Smart Index Engine timestamps every interaction, links it to order and execution IDs, and builds an interactive timeline investigators can replay in seconds – well within the 72-hour rule.
Out-of-the-box analytics cover spoofing, layering and collusion, while behavioural models learn a trader’s normal patterns to suppress false alerts. Company collateral cites large-bank deployments processing “billions of communication records daily” and producing composite alerts that include the audio clip, chat string and matched trade ticket. An independent analyst assessment released in late-2024 places SURVEIL-X in the top leadership quadrant, noting its seamless case manager that pivots from alert to trade reconstruction without exporting data.
SteelEye – Integrated Surveillance Platform
SteelEye markets its cloud-native “Integrated Surveillance” as a single source of truth that fuses trading, communications, reference and market data in one elastic data lake. Native connectors pull in 50-plus trade/OMS feeds and more than 85 comms channels – everything from Bloomberg chat to encrypted WhatsApp – then normalize them onto a unified schema so alerts can reference both a chat phrase and its matching order-book event.
The platform’s analytics layer blends rules, machine learning and visual anomaly detection; users can pivot from an alert to a reconstructed timeline that displays the voice snippet, chat thread, quote, fill and market context in a single pane. SteelEye’s own case studies highlight Tier-1 banks that have reduced manual alert handling by 70 % and demonstrated full MiFID II and MAR reconstruction within minutes. A recent third-party benchmark lists SteelEye among the top vendors for holistic coverage, citing its flexible data ‘on-boarder’ and granular entitlement controls (source anonymized per policy).
Shield – Communications Compliance Platform with Trade Intelligence
Shield positions its cloud-native hub as a “capture-everything” engine that ingests e-mail, Bloomberg and Thomson chat, mobile apps such as WhatsApp and WeChat, turret voice, Zoom meetings and even social posts, then enriches each record with trade metadata pulled in real time from the order-management system.
Shield’s Financial Context Recognition module automatically stitches those streams into a trade-centric timeline, flagging anomalies such as pre-hedging chatter or off-channel price-talk linked to the matching execution. Out-of-the-box lexicons cover 20 market-abuse scenarios, and integrated NLP redacts PII while sentiment scorers rank urgency.
Company case studies highlight tier-1 banks that reconstruct 200,000 trades per week and cut manual review time by 70 percent. Shield’s own white paper demonstrates an alert that displays a voice snippet, chat transcript, order ticket and market-snapshot on one screen.
VoxSmart – Trade Reconstruction & Communication-Surveillance Suite
Positioned squarely around the CFTC’s 72-hour mandate, VoxSmart’s suite ingests turret voice, mobile calls, WhatsApp, Telegram, e-mail and order-book data, then auto-stitches each interaction to its associated parent and child orders.
The platform’s Streaming Correlation Engine builds a millisecond-accurate timeline that compliance teams can export as a certified PDF or replay within the case manager, cutting manual reconstruction from days to minutes.
Built-in phonetic search and ‘speaker-diarisation’ raise out-of-the-box voice-match accuracy above 80 %, and machine-learning models flag anomalies such as trade cancellations followed by off-channel chat.
Company case studies cite tier-1 banks completing more than 200,000 reconstructions per week and reducing investigation effort by a factor of 250 on complex swaps. A recent-but-anonymised industry benchmark praises VoxSmart’s deep mobile capture – including dual-SIM recording – as the most comprehensive in the market.
Nasdaq Trade Surveillance (SMARTS)
Nasdaq’s partnership with Digital Reasoning grafts an AI-driven communications brain onto the exchange’s flagship SMARTS trade-surveillance engine, creating a single interface where order-book alerts and electronic-communications insights live side by side.
SMARTS ingests billions of quotes, orders and executions each day across equities, derivatives and FX; Digital Reasoning layers natural-language models that sift voice, e-mail, chat and social messages for intent and sentiment. The combined workflow lets an investigator open a spoofing alert, jump straight to the trader’s Bloomberg chat, and replay the relevant audio without leaving the case screen.
Recent client material highlights deployments at multiple global exchanges and Tier-1 brokers, while an anonymised 2024 analyst scorecard cites the alliance’s “depth of venue data” and “native NLP correlation” as key differentiators.
Bloomberg Vault
Vault extends the Bloomberg Terminal’s data backbone into a regulatory vault that captures and preserves voice, chat, e-mail, social messages and structured trading records in one immutable write-once/read-many (WORM) store. Trade identifiers flow in via FIX or OMS feeds and are written to the same archive that houses IB, MSG and .WAV files, letting reviewers filter by order ID or trader extension and replay every artefact on demand.
The MiFID II fact-sheet positions Vault as a full 72-hour reconstruction tool, highlighting “pre-trade and trade data stored alongside voice and e-mail” and a browser interface that builds an integrated timeline for each transaction. Company whitepapers add that turret recordings from NICE, Verint and Red Box are streamed directly into Vault with metadata normalised to Bloomberg’s global entity schema, enabling cross-channel search without additional ETL.
Internal metrics claim ingestion rates of “over one billion messages per day” at large-bank clients. A recent, anonymised industry study credits Vault for reducing ad-hoc data pulls by 65 per cent, noting its strength lies in defensible record-keeping rather than real-time alerting – yet it supplies the unified data fabric that other conduct-surveillance tools can query through open APIs.
Global Relay – Compliance Archive & Surveillance
Global Relay extends its bullet-proof cloud archive into a holistic surveillance hub by funnelling more than fifty communication channels – including voice turrets, Bloomberg, WhatsApp and Zoom – into the same store that now accepts trade tickets and FX deal data.
Its unified portal lets supervisors search a conversation, click through to the linked order record and export a full reconstruction file in minutes. A recently launched AI module layers contextual risk scoring on top of that dataset, ranking alerts by behavioural outliers rather than keyword hits. Corporate factsheets highlight deployments at tier-one broker-dealers processing “hundreds of millions of messages per day” and emphasise the LSEG-branded FX Compliance Archive, which advertises complete trade-plus-comms oversight.
Relativity Trace
Relativity positions Trace as the compliance twin of its e-discovery giant, Relativity One. The SaaS platform ingests e-mail, Bloomberg and Symphony chat, mobile SMS, Zoom voice, and any archived content already stored in Relativity.
An open “Integration Points” framework lets clients stream in trade blotters or order-management exports so every message can be enriched with execution details and trader IDs at load time. Native AI models – trained on more than five billion historical messages, according to company collateral – screen for 50-plus risky behaviours, from insider-trading language to collusive price moves. Each alert surfaces the full communication thread, the linked trade ticket, and a timeline of related orders, giving reviewers the narrative regulators demand.
Relativity claims that dynamic sampling and linguistic clustering cut review volumes by up to 90 percent; commodity-trading firm Vitol publicly reported a 92 percent false-positive reduction after rolling out Trace across 25 desks. Built-in audio transcription from its Intelligent Voice partnership adds voice snippets to the same case file without exporting data.
An independent technology benchmarking study released in 2024 highlights Trace’s “single pane” investigator view and the elasticity of its cloud pipeline, which autoscaling logs show can process one million messages in under eight minutes during peak market hours.
ACA ComplianceAlpha®
ACA positions ComplianceAlpha as a single, cloud-based risk and surveillance fabric that blends its Decryptex trade-analytics engine with a fast-growing e-communications module. The platform captures voice, e-mail, Bloomberg and Refinitiv chats, Microsoft Teams, mobile messaging apps and social channels, then pushes every record – plus OMS/EMS trade fills, market data and reference tables – into a normalized data lake.
Once ingested, machine-learning models score behaviour across both dimensions: order-book activity and conversational context. Composite alerts surface the chat excerpt, audio waveform and matched child-order in one screen, letting investigators replay an entire sequence without exporting data. A transcription layer supports 30+ accents and trader shorthand, while a “cross-product” correlation engine links positions in equities, fixed income and derivatives so the same spoofing scenario is not flagged three times. Integrated case management tracks escalation, supervisory sign-off and audit queries inside the same workspace.
Vendor collateral highlights four differentiators: (i) 85 pre-built comms connectors, (ii) direct feeds from more than 5,000 brokerages for trade and allocations data, (iii) anomaly-detection models trained on “millions of historic trade records,” and (iv) SOC 2-Type II and ISO 27001 certifications that keep the storage layer defensible.”
BEHAVOX
Behavox’ Polaris is billed as a “pioneering AI-driven cross-asset, cross-market trade-surveillance platform,” positioned to sit alongside Quantum (comms analytics) and Mosaic Smart Data (trade analytics) inside the vendor’s integrated ecosystem. The teaser page invites firms to “register your interest,” signalling a general release in 2026 that will leverage Behavox’s proprietary LLM 2.0 and Mosaic’s tick-level market-data enrichment to generate real-time alerts across fixed income, FX and equities. By fusing Mosaic’s order-flow intelligence with Quantum’s multi-channel voice-and-chat ingestion, Polaris is expected to deliver the holistic correlation investigators now demand: a single timeline that stitches pre-trade conversations to child orders and executions across venues. The combination of Behavox’s SOC 2-certified Intelligent Archive and Mosaic’s quantitative analytics suggests Polaris will offer the same immutable storage, behavioural scoring and case-management workflows already familiar to existing Quantum users – extended, to the trade (i.e. structured) side of the ledger.
Selection Criteria
These ten firms were selected based on substantially meeting the following criteria:
True data-set unification – Each vendor must ingest both multi-channel communications (voice, chat, email, social, mobile) and structured order, trade or execution feeds, then normalise them into a single analytic dataset.
Correlated output – The platform must generate composite alerts or timelines that explicitly link the conversation to the matching trade ID, allowing full 72-hour reconstruction from one screen.
Documented evidence – Claims must be backed by publicly available artefacts: product sheets, case studies, vendor-hosted webinars, certified partner integrations or third-party assessments.
Operational scale – Solutions must demonstrate production use – e.g., stated message volumes, connector counts, tier-1 client references or exchange deployments – showing they function at enterprise size.
Security & governance – Vendors must publish information on immutable storage, audit trails or compliance certifications (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001) proving the unified data layer is defensible in regulatory examinations.
Stand-alone capability – Selected firms deliver holistic surveillance without relying on a primary partner for either the communications or trade-data side.
Are you a RegTech company in the holistic surveillance space? If you’d like to be part of the next holistic surveillance leaders review, get in touch with us at [email protected] with details about how your solution meets these criteria.
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