SEBI Selects SAS For Investigations Dept

Increasing regulations and scrutiny demand sophisticated analysis and monitoring to spot market malpractice and trading compliance. To achieve the robust surveillance required to ensure unbiased trading platforms, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) chose SAS, the business analytics software and services provider, for its investigations department. Comprehensive data integration using SAS data warehousing and business analytics speeds investigation of suspicious transactions, boosting investor confidence.

“Pulling data into our warehouse and analysing it the next day is our single most important task,” said Avneesh Pandey, General Manager for SEBI. Pandey heads technology projects for the organisation’s surveillance, investigations and research departments. “With SAS, we maintain uniformity, making data easier to analyse. The result: smarter investigations for quicker results.”

“We are very pleased to partner with SEBI in building best practices to spot market malpractice and trading compliance besides addressing the growing volume of data. SAS with its technical acumen in Business Analytics and understanding of the Indian market will be able to provide SEBI a single view of customers across exchanges,” said Sudipta K. Sen, Regional Director, South East Asia and CEO & Managing Director, SAS Institute (India) Pvt. Ltd.

Committed to attention to detail and ensuring market safety, SEBI’s investigators and analytics group use SAS to analyse market behaviour. To handle data growth and build a tighter fraud surveillance and investigation platform, SEBI sought a robust warehouse, high-end analytics, and better predictive modeling and text mining.

“SAS offers superior data integration and management – the core of our data warehouse,” said Pandey. “Data loading is crucial. We collect about 25GB of data per day and project reaching 80GB per day in two years. With SAS, we can accelerate the process of utilising this data.”

Besides addressing growing volumes of data, SAS gives SEBI a single view of customers across exchanges. SEBI can now establish relationships between market participants and generate more accurate fraud alerts based on market participants’ behaviour. SEBI also wanted to tap unstructured data, including analyst recommendations, blogs, annual reports, etc. to understand social media impact on investor behaviour.

SEBI uses SAS Enterprise Data Integration Server to load their warehouse with disparate data from multiple exchanges countrywide. The SAS Data Quality component cleanses, standardises and removes duplicate data to build a single-entity view of market participants.

SEBI intends to build analytical models using SAS EnterpriseMiner to identify known market manipulation patterns such as circular trading, pump and dump, insider trading and front running. SAS helps to identify unknown patterns for investigators to analyse and detect any new market manipulation patterns, increasing efficiency and effectiveness in market surveillance and investigation. “The last thing you want is to waste time chasing down things that don’t turn out to be fraud,” said Pandey.

SEBI views its data warehouse as an intelligent system where analytics run within the warehouse, rather than outside. With SAS Scoring Accelerator, the data warehouse processes core statistical and analytic functions, reducing movement of data and taking advantage of parallel processing. It also prevents data inconsistency while promoting better data governance.