Nasdaq has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Sybenetix – a UK-based start-up that we introduced during our fintech showcase at last year’s A-Team Group Intelligent Trading Summit in London.
The price of the acquisition hasn’t been disclosed, but Nasdaq plans to make Sybenetix and its flagship product Compass part of its Smarts and TradeGuard surveillance portfolio. Compass provides buy-side compliance teams with behavioural profiling algorithms that can improve trade surveillance by providing more accurate identification of suspicious activity and support the requirements of regulations such as Market Abuse Regulation (MAR).
Commenting on the acquisition, the Sybenetix team stated: “Today, Sybenetix achieved a very important milestone on our journey. We have reached an agreement to join our forces with Nasdaq. Over the course of the past few months, we got to know Nasdaq better as a company and as individuals. Both sides became more excited about the possibilities of working together as one team. We did not decide to sell Sybenetix. We decided to sell Sybenetix to Nasdaq.”
President and CEO of Nasdaq, Adena Friedman, says Nasdaq believes behavioural science, cognitive computing and machine intelligence are essential to successful surveillance. The acquisition of Sybenetix, she says, “accelerates our offering to the buy-side and advances our ambitions to expand market integrity controls into all segments of the capital markets.”
