Markets aren’t getting any quieter. Trading volumes continue to rise, market structures are becoming more complex, and surveillance teams are being asked to monitor more activity without sacrificing coverage. U.S. listed options alone reached a record 15.2 billion contracts in 2025, up 24.4% from the prior year.
That growth creates a familiar challenge for compliance teams: more activity can mean more alerts to review. And simply generating fewer of them isn’t the answer.
Last year, research from Datos Insights found that 55% of the financial institutions surveyed had false positive rates above 25%. At the same time, the study found that firms are understandably cautious about tightening parameters simply to bring those numbers down. Over-calibration can reduce noise, but it can also create blind spots.
So the emphasis must go somewhere else: not just on how many alerts a surveillance program generates, but how effectively teams can understand, prioritize and act on them.
Cast Wide, Then Focus In
A broad surveillance net can capture activity that might be missed by a more narrowly calibrated approach. But breadth is only useful if analysts have the tools to quickly zero in on what matters. This is where filtering can make a meaningful difference.
Within the Validus Alert Dashboard, users can filter alerts based on the underlying alert data itself – narrowing a large population by parameters such as percentage price change, time between fill and cancel or other specific values associated with the behavior under review. For a spoofing procedure, for example, an analyst can drill into a particular time-to-cancel value and quickly reduce hundreds of alerts to the subset most relevant to the analysis.
The same approach can be applied across 30-, 60-, or 90-day periods. That gives teams a broader view of how particular behaviors appear over time and a way to assess how potential threshold changes would affect alert volumes before making them.
The result is a more informed approach to calibration. Instead of starting with the objective of driving alert counts down, teams can use the data within those alerts to understand what they are seeing, identify the activity that warrants closer attention and spot patterns that may lend themselves to automation.
Making Filtering Part of the Workflow
The value of the Validus Alert Dashboard also comes from making the analysis repeatable. Filters can be modified directly, saved to individual profiles for easy reuse and shared across an organization. That can help analysts return quickly to common views while supporting more consistent workflows across teams.
As surveillance teams contend with more market activity and more data, broad coverage and efficient review don’t have to be competing priorities. The ability to quickly narrow, analyze and learn from the alert population can help teams maintain a wide surveillance lens while focusing their time where it matters most.
To learn more about Validus and its alert management capabilities, contact us.