The Australian Securities & Investments Commission (Asic) has introduced a new market surveillance system known as MAI (market analysis intelligence) to help it detect, investigate and prosecute trading breaches.

The system provides sophisticated data analytics to identify suspicious trading in real time and across markets, as well as greater levels of detection of insider trading, said commissioner Cathie Armour.

“It is built around algorithmic trading technology and gives Asic the ability to analyse trade data for patterns and relationships. This provides us with even greater means to catch insider trading and more broadly, detect market misconduct.”

Senior executive leader of market and participant supervision, Greg Yanco, said MAI was purpose built and designed to handle the dynamism of financial markets. “It will be able to handle the continued increase in high frequency trading and algorithmic trading and improves on technology that was previously designed for a single market.”

The new system enables Asic to interrogate very large data sets and monitor market activity, consistent with the increased use of technology in day-to-day trading, Yanco added. “It can also handle the continued increase in trade and message data, which could reach one billion messages per day.”

MAI is designed, built and hosted by First Derivatives and is based on technology used in financial markets for market data capture, alerts and analytics and high frequency and algorithmic trading.