08 Oct The top 50 employers in the fastest growing area of fintech- Trade Surveillance

If you’re looking for a job in financial technology and you want to work for a vendor rather than for an actual bank, you might want to consider the area of trade surveillance technology. It’s growing, fast.

For those unfamiliar with the term, trade surveillance technology companies provide banks with automated systems to that check no abusive, illegal or manipulative practices are taking place in their sales and trading businesses. Having been burned both badly and expensively in the past, most banks now have reason to ensure they limit the risk of future infringements as much as they possibly can.

In a new report on trade surveillance technology, analysts at Greenwich calculate that the trade surveillance tech market is likely to be worth $1.2bn in revenues annually by the end of this year. They predict that revenues will be 23% higher at $1.5bn in 2021, and will reach $1.8bn in 2022.

Trade surveillance spending was always going to grow this year, but Greenwich analysts say it’s been given an extra boost by the pandemic and working from home. – Under COVID-19, Greenwich says banks and the buy-side encountered a “perfect storm” of trade surveillance issues that included problems obtaining monitored and secure market access, alert backlogs, and adjusting trade surveillance to remote working. In combination, this has encouraged them to ramp up spending, and is good news for the leading vendors in the space.

Helpfully, Greenwich breaks out the top 50 trade surveillance specialists who should benefit from this boom. It also categorizes them by area, depending upon whether they cover communications between market participants (eg. traders’ chat) or whether they’re focused on trade surveillance technologies that analyze transactions to identify suspicious activities like market manipulation and insider dealing.

Greenwich’s categorization of the market is shown in the chart below. Some of these, like Symphony, are known to us and known to be growing. Others, like London-based Soteria are less well known.