Written by Martina Rejsjo, Head of Product Strategy
Regulators have long emphasized the importance of holistic surveillance across equities, derivatives, fixed income and, increasingly, digital assets. Yet despite this clear expectation, most market participants struggle to implement truly integrated surveillance programs at scale. While many have matured their capabilities within individual asset classes, conducting surveillance across products remains a persistent challenge.
According to The Trade Surveillance Revolution, a recent study by Datos Insights commissioned by Eventus, 56% of global sell-side firms surveyed are operating with fragmented surveillance infrastructure, and 60% feel neutral to dissatisfied toward their current data quality. Meanwhile, 45% of firms identify cross-asset correlated alerts as a top area for improvement – higher than any other category.
These findings make it clear that the core issue isn’t awareness – it’s the fact that most institutions are still constrained by legacy systems and narrowly scoped surveillance logic. And the more markets evolve, the more significant that constraint becomes.
Heightened Pressure: The Risk of Fragmentation
The cross-product challenge isn’t new – but the need to solve it is intensifying. Technical limitations of existing surveillance setups are colliding with evolving market dynamics and growing regulatory expectations. Modern trading strategies increasingly span multiple asset classes. Institutional desks are no longer constrained by product lines, and workflows often involve interrelated activity across spot markets, derivatives and fragmented equity venues.
Newer trends continue to add to the complexity. The structural fragmentation of digital assets has introduced new challenges, while the expansion of 24/5 and after-hours trading will extend the window of opportunity for misconduct. Regulators are carefully monitoring all this complexity and refining their expectations in kind. The bottom line: cross-product surveillance is no longer just a box to check, but a technical imperative for firms seeking to mitigate reputational and financial risk.
So why has cross-product surveillance remained so elusive? As usual, the answer lies in the data. The industry’s current siloed surveillance setups aren’t built to detect multi-layered manipulation; many systems still operate asset-by-asset or account-by-account, with little ability to connect related trading activity across products or platforms. As a result, firms often catch suspicious activity in one area without grasping its role in a broader pattern involving related products.
This is because reference data like account hierarchies, client IDs and instrument mappings are often incomplete or inconsistently applied. In many cases, firms attempt to patch over these limitations by manually mapping relationships between products – such as spot commodities and corresponding futures – and applying basic logic to connect the dots. But these mappings are static, labor-intensive and prone to oversight. When fragmentation undermines a firm’s ability to detect misconduct and respond effectively to regulatory inquiries, it’s more than inefficient – it’s a liability.
Cross-Product Manipulation in Practice
None of this is theoretical. The recent ban (since overturned) of a large trading firm from India’s financial markets is a perfect example. Regulators have accused a trader of manipulating the price of an equity to influence a broad-based index, then taking a significant position in index options to capitalize on the resulting move. This purported scheme involved three distinct asset classes – equity and equity futures, index futures and options – yet may have evaded detection by firms still monitoring each product in isolation. While the dust is still settling from this incident – we may not know the whole truth for some time – it speaks to a growing climate of enforcement around cross-product manipulation.
Other examples are widespread. In commodity markets, participants may exploit spot-futures relationships to shift prices in one leg and profit in another. With ETFs, subtle pressure on illiquid components can be used to move NAV calculations in a way that benefits opposing positions. And in the digital asset market, cross-venue arbitrage – executed across platforms with no shared surveillance infrastructure – creates ample opportunity for manipulation.
These types of cases are increasingly common because the underlying asset relationships make them fertile ground for abuse. Each opens the door for subtle, hard-to-catch manipulations – and without the ability to connect those dots, firms remain exposed.
A Modern Solution: Unified Data and Correlation-Based Detection
Eventus takes a fundamentally different approach to cross-product surveillance – one that begins with behavior, not assumptions. Instead of trying to manually map products or make assumptions about relationships, the Validus platform applies behavior-based scenarios such as spoofing, layering or quote stuffing across all trading activity tied to a specific trader, desk or account group. This is the foundation for a correlation-based detection model.
If an alert for suspicious behavior is flagged, the system then applies a correlation analysis across the instruments involved to determine whether they moved together in a statistically meaningful way – revealing potential manipulation. This behavior-first methodology eliminates the need for static mappings and enables surveillance teams to uncover complex, dynamic relationships in real time.
Of course, effective cross-product surveillance is impossible without advanced data ingestion and normalization capabilities – and that’s where Eventus truly stands apart. While many platforms on the market rely on predefined APIs or narrowly scoped integrations with order management systems, Validus can ingest data from virtually any source – whether it’s piped in from an OMS and uploaded from Excel. No matter the format, our platform can integrate and process it as part of a unified surveillance environment.
Validus supports multi-level account normalization, enabling clients to consolidate trading activity across legal entities, brokers and desks. In addition, its built-in visualization tools provide clear, consolidated views of order flow, executions and alerts – giving compliance teams the context they need to assess behavior holistically. This technical flexibility reduces onboarding friction and enables firms to scale surveillance without needing to reengineer their entire infrastructure.
An Intelligent Foundation for What’s Next
To effectively perform trade surveillance across asset classes, firms do not need more rules and reports, but a more intelligent foundation: unified architecture, behavior-first detection models and systems built to adapt to real-world dynamics. The right tools can make cross-product surveillance not just possible, but scalable and systematic. Eventus delivers that foundation and offers a practical path forward, so firms can detect risk across every corner of the trade lifecycle.
Ready to eliminate your surveillance blind spots? Contact us to learn how Validus can help solve your cross-product surveillance inefficiencies and future-proof your compliance infrastructure.