Mission Critical Trade Surveillance Powered by TimeBase

video20 Jul 2025

Background

Following the 2008 financial crisis, there has been heightened regulatory scrutiny on financial institutions. Deutsche Bank sought to build a sustainable and efficient trade surveillance program to detect market misconduct (e.g., spoofing, market manipulation) and ensure regulatory compliance. The bank’s approach centered on three pillars: data collection, advanced analytics, and improving the end-user experience for trade analysts.

Challenges

Regulatory Pressure: Increased need to identify bad market behavior and mitigate risks in real time.
Legacy System Shortcomings:
- Existing caching-based solutions were slow, unable to support on-the-fly calculations, and resulted in significant delays for investigators (e.g., 2+ hours to analyze complex alerts).
- Data growth and complexity, coupled with performance degradation, hindered scalability.
End-User Experience: Analysts faced difficulties in efficiently navigating and analyzing large datasets, negatively impacting responsiveness and decision-making.

Solution

Deutsche Bank implemented TimeBase, an open-source platform developed by EPAM, to overhaul its trade surveillance infrastructure. The solution was chosen after extensive proof-of-concept tests against market competitors.

Key Features of TimeBase:
- Low latency: Nanosecond responsiveness for real-time analytics.
- Multiplexing: Efficiently combines diverse data streams (e.g., order books, trade activity, market data) into a unified system.
- Historical Replay: Seamless playback of large historical datasets to simulate and analyze past market scenarios.
- Integration: Supports analytics through tools like Python, Java, and Jupyter Notebook.
Implementation:
- TimeBase was deployed as both a messaging middleware and a historical storage system for real-time investigations.
- Analysts leveraged filtering algorithms and query-based tools to detect suspicious trading behaviors (e.g., spoofing detection based on order cancellations and price effects).

Results

Efficiency Gains:
- 30-40% improvement in alert review times, enabling analysts to focus on meaningful investigations rather than false positives.
- Complex investigations that previously took hours were reduced to minutes.
Performance Improvements: The solution provided nanosecond-level latency and faster zoom-in/zoom-out capabilities for real-time data analysis.
Stronger Regulatory Compliance: Enhanced ability to detect market misconduct and reduce systemic risks.
Ease of Adoption: Deutsche Bank quickly deployed TimeBase Community Edition, with robust support from EPAM to scale the solution to an enterprise-grade level.

Conclusion

Deutsche Bank successfully modernized its trade surveillance program by adopting TimeBase, which provided a scalable, low-latency, and highly efficient platform. This not only improved compliance with regulatory requirements but also enhanced the experience and productivity of its trade analysts.