As part of the consortium, b-next, a specialist provider of market abuse surveillance, insider dealing and compliance software solutions, has developed two new and unique scenarios to monitor market surveillance.

1. PRESS RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PRESS CONTACTS:
Cognito
Paul Bowhay / Katherine Dvorkin
+44 (0)20 7426 9400
bnext@cognitomedia.com
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b-next develops a prototype for EU-backed Project FIRST to analyse financial services
sentiment from social media
London, 27 January, 2014 – Project FIRST, the European Union-backed consortium, recently
launched a prototype market surveillance system that can extract and analyse financial services-
related sentiment from social media networks. As part of the consortium, b-next, a specialist provider
of market abuse surveillance, insider dealing and compliance software solutions, has developed two
new and unique scenarios to monitor market surveillance.
FIRST addresses the challenges of dealing with unstructured information to generate patterns which
can further enhance the user’s overview of the market. b-next has worked alongside use case
partners Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, Boerse Stuttgart, Interactive Data and the University of
Hohenheim, to demonstrate ways to make use of the developed technologies in FIRST in the fields of
market surveillance, risk management, and online retail brokerage and investment management.
As specialists in market surveillance, b-next’s team of experts have developed two surveillance
scenarios: ‘Pump & Dump’ and ‘Market Sounding’, to make use of large volumes of unstructured data
in financial compliance and develop automated techniques to better detect market abuse and insider
trading.
Wolfgang Fabisch, CEO b-next, said: “The developed prototype can make a major contribution to
better detect market abuse and offers ground-breaking possibilities to increase the efficiency of
market supervision and financial market regulation. In today’s world of rapidly evolving financial
markets, the ability to determine sentiment of market participants can be extremely valuable to detect
and deliver decision support by aggregation, analysis and visualisation. We are pleased to be part of
a project that is opening up new ways to extract information that can have a significant impact on the
evolving conditions in advanced financial decision making.”
b-next have been working on the FIRST project since it was launched in late 2010. The three-year
project aimed to harness artificial intelligence to find information on the Internet that can be used to
support financial decision makers, and was supported by a EUR4.6 million budget co-funded by the
EU. The FIRST project analysed 15 million documents combined from 215 internet sources such as
financial blogs, forums, and social media channels.
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Notes to editors
About b-next
b-next is a specialist provider of proven multi-venue, multi-asset class, Capital Markets Surveillance
and Compliance software solutions to meet regulatory mandates, manage risk and drive trading
efficiencies. The b-next Capital Markets Compliance (CMC) solution is a single integrated
compliance platform for detection of Market Abuse, Insider Trading, Conflict of
Interest, Derivatives/OTC Monitoring, Best Execution reporting and more. With over 150 customers,
b-next has a 20 year history of delivering solutions to market participants, exchanges and regulators.
For more information please visit: www.b-next.com