A unified data fabric is fast becoming wholesale finance’s front line of defence. By fusing millions of voice calls, chat messages and trade records into a single analytical view, next generation surveillance promises to detect misconduct in minutes and to satisfy regulators who increasingly ask firms to prove that capability. A-Team Group RegTech Summits in London (16 October) and New York City (20 November) will bring those expectations and the technology that meets them into sharp focus.
The legal foundation has been in place for years: For example, CFTC Rule 1.35 requires swap dealers and futures brokers to keep and reproduce all pre trade communications – voice, chat, email – linked to an order. What has changed is the speed and completeness that supervisors now assume. The SEC’s 2025 examination priorities flag information security and operational resiliency as critical to market integrity reviews and warn that claims about AI or digital products will be tested against underlying data governance controls. In the UK, fresh FCA data show 4,527 Suspicious Transaction and Order Reports (STORs) for 2024, the highest total since MiFID II went live – with more than 90% concerning insider dealing.A continuing SEC–CFTC sweep over “off channel” business communications has already extracted more than $1.7 billion in penalties, including a $16million August 2024 settlement with Piper Sandler that underscored how quickly fines follow poor recordkeeping.
Against that backdrop, the RegTech Summit London event devotes an afternoon panel to the question every chief compliance officer needs to be able to answer – “can you replay the entire trade narrative – voice, chat and blotter – within the 72 hours expected?”
Data is the Battlefield – Capture is the First Skirmish
On a typical trading desk, turret WAV files, Microsoft Teams transcripts, Bloomberg chats, FIX messages and nanosecond market data flow through independent systems that seldom share clocks or identifiers. Bringing them together demands certified capture connectors, immutable cloud object stores and a normalisation layer that stamps every record with a harmonised trader ID and time source.In a recent interview with RegTech Insight, Mark Gilman, General Counsel and VP of Compliance at Theta Lake noted that “over 80 % of firms are using four or more communication platforms.” In addition to providing a “single pane of glass” to bring disparate sources into a single view, Theta Lake’s AI Governance & Inspection Suite inspects output from Zoom AI Companion and Microsoft Copilot before voice transcripts hit the archive, ensuring that AI generated content is governed to the same evidential standard as human speech. By plugging that feed straight into surveillance pipelines, firms can prevent a fresh generation of “dark data” from taking root.
From Blueprint to Reality
Once capture and enrichment are solved, the real value appears in the correlation layer. Modern platforms unite deterministic rules (e.g., wash trade price bands) with natural language processing, sentiment analysis and, increasingly, large language model summarisation.
A May 2025 generative AI upgrade to Nice Actimize’s Surveil-X cut false positives by up to 85% while simultaneously surfacing four times more genuine misconduct signals in pilot banks across North America and Europe. Investigators now receive short “narrative” explanations – complete with the linked chat excerpt, voice transcript and orderbook replay – rather than disjointed red flags. The RegTech Summit New York agenda’s ‘blueprint to reality’ session will dissect the underlying data engineering choices that make those composite alerts reliable at scale.Five Themes Shaping Surveillance for 202526
Explainable GenAI takes centre stage. Regulators no longer ask if firms use AI in surveillance but how the models were trained, validated and governed. The SEC has signalled that representations about AI capabilities will be crosschecked during examinations, with particular focus on bias controls and data lineage. Early pilots show dramatic accuracy gains – but only when firms can expose every prompt, parameter and training corpus to auditors.
The voice renaissance. Tradervoice previously languished behind chat and email, but advances in domain-tuned speech-to-text have removed that blind spot. Industry analysis warns that random sampling of calls “is no longer defensible” given the precision of modern transcription and tone analysis engines. SteelEye cautions that relying on random sampling alone leaves a significant compliance blind spot—its research shows that real-time, high-accuracy voice transcription is essential to transform trader calls into searchable, actionable risk intelligence rather than unchecked “dark data” Expect voice risk to be a headline at both summits, particularly as fixed income desks embrace remote soft turrets.
Off channel messaging under the microscope. Multibillion dollar penalty totals have pushed WhatsApp and SMS capture from a “nice to have” to a mandatory board level metric. Enforcement orders now reference not just missing records but the controls that failed to prevent them, signalling that “we told traders not to use personal devices” is no longer a defence.
Cross-asset correlation becomes table stakes. New platforms advertised for general release in 2026 promise to stitch fixed income, FX and equity data into a single timeline that starts with the dealer chat and ends with the fill across multiple venues. Analysts predict this will cut alert duplication by as much as 50% and catch manipulations that slip through with siloed data.
Surveillance has outgrown piecemeal tooling. Today’s compliance mandate is to combine communications, underlying intent and trade execution as a single, regulator ready narrative – and to do so even if the primary data centre is down. RegTech innovators such as Smarsh, who recently opened their archive via robust APIs and next generation AI services, show that the pieces are ready for deployment. The remaining task is strategic: weaving those pieces into a resilient fabric before the next FCA Market Watch letter or SEC sweep arrives.
The RegTech Summits in London and New York offer a full day of keynotes, case studies and live demos where senior compliance practitioners will have an opportunity to see what “good” looks like.
Register for RegTech Summit London HERE, and for RegTech Summit New York HERE.
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