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 was impacting their ability to assess risk levels. The monitoring process demanded a greater level of fine-tuning and granularity for the team to be confident that compliance requirements were being met in the best way 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 and continual 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 that the input data would get the best output of the monitoring solution, to the final steps of configurations before going live in production. Together with Winterflood’s assigned project managers, coordinated teamwork across both parties was the key to success in maintaining visibility on 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 with the Winterflood team on how to use 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 does monthly QA reports that require a lot of time and admin. Trapets has been talking to them about developing a solution that would expedite the work, but in the meantime has been helping them leverage existing functionalities.
