Watching Wall Street

In today’s US capital markets millions of securities, bonds and shares change hands every day. The participants – brokers, banks and investment managers alike – rely on the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) to bring order to the settlement process. Ensuring orderly settlement of around 50 million trades every day, totalling around US$1.4 quadrillion per year, the DTCC is the beating heart of America’s financial centre. In a move that includes the deployment of anti-money laundering detection software from Norkom Technologies, the DTCC is acting to improve AML security for itself and its customers. A byproduct will be the creation of immensely powerful macro surveillance capability for regulators.

The Norkom deployment, announced in February, will allow the DTCC to move to a point where all trades made by each DTCC customer are monitored on an ongoing basis, building a complete business profile of each, based on their historical trading patterns. The software will then monitor all trades made by each customer against their profiles, issuing alerts to the DTCC’s investigation and compliance team when it identifies suspicious transactions that fall outside normal parameters.