Transaction Monitoring
Comprehensive transaction monitoring helps you follow regulations, detect suspicious activity, and streamline your AML processes.
The challenge with inflexible and antiquated transaction monitoring technology
Winterflood Securities is the number one liquidity and execution services provider in the UK equity market, serving a diverse client network that includes institutional investors, retail brokers, and asset managers.
Staying on top of regulatory compliance and fighting financial crime is crucial to protecting the business’s clients and reputation.
Winterflood’s client due diligence and monitoring team had been using a transaction monitoring provider for several years.
However, they were unhappy with the service provided. It was not flexible to custom requirements and could not adapt to their business's evolving needs.
The team noticed that this was leading to lower-quality alerts, which were impacting their ability to assess risk levels.
The monitoring process required greater fine-tuning and granularity to ensure the team was confident that compliance requirements were being met as effectively as possible.
As transaction monitoring is one of Winterflood's critical business systems, replacing one system with another is challenging, with no room for downtime, as it could put the business at risk.
Because they were facing a very tight time constraint, it was crucial for Winterflood to find a system and partner that could ensure smooth implementation and onboarding, minimise the internal pain of system change, and speedy time to value.
Speedy onboarding to a flexible platform
Since 2014, Trapets has been providing a separate Winterflood team with a market and trade surveillance solution. That positive internal reference led to Trapets being the chosen partner for Winterflood’s transaction monitoring.
Winterflood was also confident that Trapets was the right match for them. Trapets could promise steadfast, ongoing support for the entire team and the flexibility to work according to Winteflood’s custom requirements.
When Winterflood began adopting Trapets Transaction Monitoring in January 2024, they only had 4 to 6 weeks to onboard and deploy the system, as they were already offboarding the previous vendor.
This left very little room for trial and error, but from the start, Trapets assured the team that they would be able to go live within the deadline.
Trapets’ customer success team guided Winterflood through the initial steps of mapping their data, ensuring the input data would yield the best possible output from the monitoring solution, to the final steps of configuration before going live in production.
Together with Winterflood’s assigned project managers, coordinated teamwork between the two parties was the key to maintaining visibility into the project's progress, ensuring seamless communication, and solving problems quickly to meet deadlines.
Everything went according to plan, and the Trapets Transaction Monitoring system was launched within the expected time frame.
Trapets arranged training sessions for the Winterflood team on using the live platform. When questions arose, Winterflood solved them directly with Trapets reps.
The level of attention during the onboarding and implementation phase also continued post-onboarding.
For example, Winterflood produces monthly QA reports that require a lot of time and admin effort.
Trapets has been talking to them about developing a solution to expedite the work, but in the meantime, has been helping them leverage existing functionality.
"Trapets is always accommodating to our needs; they assist us in how we use the system and try to make it easier for us. Having a vendor that proactively listens to customer needs to further enhance their internal solution is truly special."
Smooth transition, fast time to value and higher-quality alerts
Winterflood’s team was pleasantly surprised with Trapets’ ability to deliver extremely fast time to value: they were able to meet the tight deadline, overcome curveballs, and ultimately deploy a far more effective model than the previous one.
Apart from the smooth implementation and translation from one system to another, Winterflood’s team immediately saw far higher-quality alerts coming in, improving the overall quality of the team's work.
This was a result of Trapets’ new system being customised to a high enough level of sensitivity to different factors.
That level of granularity and the ability to accommodate the team's needs is key to Winterflood’s operations, as it is a heavily regulated business.
This gave Winterflood the confidence to meet regulatory requirements and the capacity to protect its business and brand reputation.
Winterflood was also impressed by the solution's modern and workable feel. It was highly intuitive when it came to tailoring the dashboard and different area sections to their preferences, such as customers, alerts or transaction data.
To filter and display based on individual user preferences, which added to the user-friendly experience. With monitoring teams spending much of their time looking at data on screens, the platform’s functional and appealing display made employees’ work far easier.
