Credit Suisse Standard Securities has signed on to the SMARTS.broker market surveillance service. SMARTS.broker will provide the broker with a suite of monitoring and alert services to assist the firm with their surveillance and compliance requirements.

CSSS is a joint venture between two financial services groups and is based in South Africa. The deal provides surveillance coverage of all products traded on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

With SMARTS.broker CSSS has put in place a trade surveillance platform designed to reduce the regulatory and financial risk associated with clients or traders engaging in market abuse.

The SMARTS.broker trade surveillance service provides real-time alerts identifying trading patterns associated with market manipulation, including ‘Wash Trades', ‘Marking the Close', and ‘Layering of Orders', as well as other forms of market abuse and regulatory breaches, front-running, and trading information reports. Furthermore, SMARTS.broker provides users with access to historic trading data for listed securities, and a number of graphical tools to assist the user to interrogate the alerts and data. These include a market replay function which allows users to re-create the full order book for a security at any point in time on a trading day.

"The appeal of the SMARTS.broker solution is its advanced alert engine, user friendly interface and the ability for the system to detect the most subtle of trading irregularities. SMARTS demonstrated that they understood what we required and are able to deliver a solution with no hardware or software requirements from our end. This suited our requirements of obtaining a comprehensive surveillance system which can be set up quickly and which requires little or no IT resources on our side to run or maintain," said Yushavia Naidoo from CSSS.