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ASX
Investigating with ISYS
The Australian Stock Exchange (ASX)
has many responsibilities in running an orderly and efficient stock market.
One area in which it is particularly vigilant is in ensuring that all
participants; brokers, clients and companies comply with the requirements
of the ASX and the official body that empowers it, the Australian Securities
& Investments Commission (ASIC).
The Surveillance Department of the ASX is responsible
for ensuring that the rules of the ASX and Corporations Law, which is
a piece of legislation concerning companies and financial markets, is
adhered to. Therefore, close monitoring of the market and stockbrokers
is required. The staff in the Surveillance Department are particularly
interested in significant and unexplained movements in stock prices and
volumes. If such a movement is noted, it is the responsibility of the
Surveillance group to commence preliminary enquiries. Members of the Surveillance
team will review publicly available information that may have caused this
movement first, and if no legitimate reason can be found there, they then
begin an investigation into the cause using other sources of information
unavailable to the public.
Surveillance
uses ISYS:desktop to assist in these investigations. ISYS:desktop allows
the Surveillance team to search through large volumes of data quickly
and easily to find exactly what they need. With full text search facility
and hit highlighting complete with hit-to-hit navigation, ISYS gives instant
accurate results as well as facilitating discovery of associations or
links between seemingly unrelated information.
With
records going back as far as 1989, the ASX has approximately 16.9 GB of
data to be searched via the LAN. Most of this material is Word and Excel
documents with the occasional HTML file from a market information vendor.
When an incident comes to their attention, investigators are able to perform
quick and accurate searches to check if there is any prior Surveillance
documentation relating to the company, the relevant brokers or their clients
and look for any previous enquiries made concerning any such party. If
a possible breach of the ASX rules or the Corporations Law has occurred,
any prior investigations may be relevant to the current matter.
Another
useful feature of this system is that staff can search for cases with
similar circumstances to the one currently being reviewed. This ensures
consistency in the way cases are handled as well as providing a way of
sharing knowledge. The discovery process in a similar case may well help
in the pursuit of the current one. What was discovered, or the modus operandi,
may provide possible avenues of investigation for a current case.
The
greatest advantage of all of this is how fast this can happen. At the
press of a button, staff can have this information at their fingertips.
Traditionally one would have to search through copious files of notes
in countless filing cabinets. Finding a name may be difficult, but finding
a similar case to yours could be near impossible unless you were to read
every single file. "ISYS lets us search our data effectively and
quickly," said Richard Flynn, Senior Analyst. "It also provides
us with an accurate historical database of previous investigations. We
are far more effective as a result."
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