ASIC uses its Smarts to monitor financial markets

Smarts Group has signed a $1.5 million deal with Macquarie Hosting to host its financial market monitoring software for the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

As part of the two-year agreement, Macquarie hosting will provide a full dual site, DSD and PCI compliant hosting service to ASIC through SMARTS Group. The real-time dual sites will be hosted within Macquarie Hosting’s government approved secure data centres.

ASIC took over responsibility for market surveillance following a decision by the Federal Government in 2009 to crack down on financial market manipulation and insider trading. It recently contracted the Smarts group to provide the service.

The Smarts Integrity platform is hosted on VMware vSphere4 with a production environment of more than 50 virtual servers. The system is installed at exchanges, trading venues and market regulators to monitor orders, trades and quotes. The platform takes a real-time data feed directly from the relevant trading engine and processes it on the fly, automatically detecting anomalies and producing alerts.

The test site was live within a week and a half of signing the contract, according to the hosting provider.

“Macquarie Hosting was able to successfully prove to the Smarts Group that it could meet accredited government security requirements, provide end-to-end audit capabilities and assurance of business continuity,” Smarts Group chief executive officer, Dr Andreas Furche, said in a statement.