ASIC snares $4m worth of SMARTS for shares snooping

Beverley Head
Wednesday, 24 March 2010 15:28

Business IT - Technology

With just six months to go before it takes over the real time share market monitoring role from the Australian Stock Exchange, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission has selected locally developed technology to conduct market surveillance.

The SMARTS Integrity Platform selected by ASIC is used by 30 national exchanges or regulators around the world including the London Stock Exchange which uses the platform to monitor Baikal, its pan-European non display trading market, a so called dark-pool trading environment.  It is also used by market regulators in Hong Kong and Singapore.

SMARTS Market Surveillance, which is based in Sydney, claims its tool will help ASIC identify market manipulation and insider trading. SMARTS will set up and manage the tool for ASIC for the next two years (worth $4 million), with two further six month options after that.

SMARTS CEO Dr Andreas Furche, told iTWire the software will be installed on computers hosted at the Macquarie Technology Centre, and provided as a dedicated managed service to ASIC. There is a core team of around 10 currently working on the project he said.

ASIC learned last August that it had just 14 months to revamp its technology in readiness for its new monitoring responsibilities. Previously the ASX has both operated and monitored the equities market in Australia, but last year the Federal government announced that the monitoring role would be passed over to ASIC.

ASIC is expected to take up the share market monitoring role from October.

Much of ASIC's IT energies have been focussed on a $115 million core IT systems revamp being steered by the organisation's CIO Rachel Johnson-Kelly. Having the system hosted remotely and provided on a managed service basis avoids having to build and operate an entirely new system from scratch.