The Financial Services Authority (FSA) is using complex
event processing (CEP) software to monitor transactions as it
attempts to find the source of rumours that threatened HBOS last
week.
Rumours that HBOS was in financial trouble led to a fall in its
share price and risked public confidence in the banking group.
The FSA plans to use its
Surveillance and Automated Business Reporting Engine (Sabre),
which records all details of share trades in London, to help it
identify any parties involved in the rumours by piecing together
electronic evidence of suspicious share trades.
"We are using Sabre to scan transactions and trades for the last
two weeks or so," said an FSA spokesperson.
The system uses Sun Ultrasparc 4+ servers running SAS Enterprise
Intelligence Platform, AMD Opteron servers running Progress
Software's Apama for Alerting, and Oracle and KX Systems' KDB+
relational databases.
Monitoring trading activity over the past two weeks will help
the FSA identify parties that could have benefited from the fall in
HBOS share price before launching more targeted investigations.
Bob McDowall, analyst at TowerGroup, said Sabre can help
establish evidence and circumstances but cannot prevent people
trying to distort the market.
"You can use technology to trace the source of rumours if they
were spread through technology because there will be email and
telephone trails. If the rumours were word of mouth Sabre can look
at market activity and attempt to identify people that are
potentially gaining from rumours."
He said it will be interesting to see what Sabre unearths and
whether it will be a deterrent in the future.