Trade surveillance challenges are often attributed to detection logic, analytics, or regulatory rule sets. In practice, many of the limitations firms experience originate much earlier in the trading lifecycle—at the point where trading data is created and distributed.
Surveillance platforms are frequently asked to compensate for inconsistencies that exist upstream. By the time data reaches post-trade systems, teams are already dealing with fragmented formats, asset-class-specific schemas, and client-specific transformations that add complexity without improving surveillance outcomes.
In live trading environments, surveillance platforms such as Eventus are seeing clear improvements in operational efficiency and monitoring quality when trading data is normalized before it reaches post-trade systems. Rather than ingesting multiple bespoke data formats across workflows and asset classes, Eventus receives clean, standardized data from environments where a dedicated normalization layer has already been applied.
This shift significantly reduces the effort required to ingest and reconcile data, allowing surveillance teams to focus on risk detection, behavioral analysis, and regulatory oversight rather than data preparation. In many cases, work that was historically duplicated across firms and vendors is effectively removed from the process.
At the execution layer, Quod Financial’s UNITY data normalization layer is used to standardize trade and order data at the source, creating a consistent data foundation that can be distributed across downstream systems, including surveillance and compliance platforms.
“Trade surveillance is only as effective as the quality and consistency of the data it receives,” said Joseph Schifano, Director at Eventus. “When data is normalized upstream, it removes a significant amount of friction from onboarding and improves the reliability of surveillance outcomes.”
UNITY abstracts the complexity of multi-asset trading activity, venues, and execution workflows into a unified data model, enabling downstream platforms to consume structured information without the need for extensive client-specific transformations. From Quod Financial’s perspective, this reflects a broader shift in how trading infrastructure is designed.
“Normalizing data at the source creates a shared foundation for the entire trading lifecycle,” said Chris Valpone, Director at Quod Financial. “When execution platforms provide consistent, structured data, every downstream system, from surveillance to reporting, benefits.”
More broadly, this experience highlights an industry shift toward open architectures and shared data layers, where upstream normalization is no longer a technical optimization but a structural requirement. As trading ecosystems become increasingly interconnected, data quality at the source will play a defining role in the effectiveness of post-trade surveillance and compliance.
Explore how Quod Financial’s UNITY architecture standardizes trade and order data at the source, and how Eventus leverages high-quality, normalized data to support effective trade surveillance.
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About Quod Financial
Quod Financial delivers multi-asset trading technology for banks, brokers, and asset managers, supporting the full trading lifecycle across global electronic markets. The firm’s product suite includes high-performance OMS and EMS, Smart Order Routing (SOR), Algorithmic Trading, liquidity internalization, and direct market connectivity.
At its core is Unity, Quod’s modular, cross-asset architecture that normalizes data and trading workflows. Unity enables institutions to automate and control complex operations, scale efficiently across asset classes, and adapt to evolving market structure and regulatory requirements using data-driven and AI-enhanced capabilities. For more information, visit: www.quodfinancial.com
About Eventus
Eventus provides state-of-the-art, at-scale trade surveillance software across all lines of defense. Its powerful, award-winning Validus platform is easy to deploy, customize and operate across equities, options, futures, foreign exchange (FX), fixed income and digital asset markets. Validus is proven in the most complex, high-volume, and real time environments of Eventus’ rapidly growing client base, including tier-1 banks, broker-dealers, futures commission merchants (FCMs), proprietary trading groups, market centers, buy-side institutions, energy and commodity trading firms, and regulators. Clients rely on the platform, coupled with the firm’s responsive support and product development, to overcome their most pressing trade surveillance regulatory challenges. For more, visit www.eventus.com.