Actimize, a provider of transactional risk management software for the financial services industry and a NICE Systems company, today announced that Banco Espírito Santo, listed on the Euronext 100 index, is leading the way in the Portuguese financial market by deploying Actimize’s Brokerage Compliance Market Abuse solution to identify and report suspicious transactions. The first phase of the programme has been deployed and is expected to go live in the fourth quarter of this year.

Banco Espírito Santo, one of Portugal’s leading banks, is implementing a best of breed market abuse solution to help it comply with the Market Abuse Directive. The bank, which trades on both the Portuguese Euronext Lisbon and Spanish Bolsas y Mercados Españoles (BME) exchanges, monitors market events in both regions.

“Actimize is the clear market leader in this field with a set of proven technologies and solutions and we are confident that deploying Actimize solutions will help us further strengthen our reputation in the industry and reaffirm client confidence in our high ethical and business standards,” said João Martins Pereira, Banco Espírito Santo.

Actimize’s Market Abuse solution has set the standard in Europe, enabling large to mid-sized businesses to increase their insight into suspicious behaviour and improve risk and compliance performance. The solution, used by many top global financial services organisations, helps firms comply with regulatory requirements from the Financial Services Authority, Autoriteit Finanicele Markten (AFM), Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF), Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht (BaFin), Comissão do Mercado de Valores Mobiliários (CMVM), La Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores (CNMV), and other European regulators by monitoring and detecting suspicious transactions and automatically distributing alerts directly to relevant users within an intuitive case management workflow environment. The system uses several analytical methods to assign priority scores to alerts, thus improving the efficiency of regulators, trading managers and compliance staff. Actimize solutions are all built on a single technological platform, which provides lower total cost of ownership (TCO) as compared to siloed solutions and gives firms the flexibility to incrementally add new solutions over time.

“Banco Espírito Santo’s selection of Actimize places it within an elite group of financial institutions using the latest generation of technology to combat Market Abuse and Employee Conflicts of Interest,” said Bruno Piers de Raveschoot, vice president of Europe for Actimize. “In the current economic climate, banks are encouraged to remain vigilant and work closely with the regulators to reinforce regulation and maintain market confidence. Our solutions assist trading managers and compliance staff to achieve these goals while improving their efficiency by monitoring across a variety of market instruments and providing accurate, scored alerts within a highly flexibility investigative environment with built in workflow and logic.”