Nasdaq Market Surveillance (SMARTS)
Our platform supports every stage of your surveillance program - from real-time monitoring and alerting to case management, investigations, and reporting. Purpose-built to handle both scale and nuance, it ensures broad coverage across asset classes, markets, while remaining low-touch on your internal resources.
The Most Widely-Used Surveillance Technology by Regulators and Exchanges Globally
AI That Knows What Matters
Our platform incorporates AI and machine learning to detect anomalies, prioritize risk, and surface the most relevant cases. This risk-based, behavioral approach allows teams to tailor surveillance thresholds to their unique risk appetite—empowering more focused and effective compliance.
Unmatched Accuracy: High True Positives, Low False Positives
Our platform significantly reduces false positives by integrating and analyzing complete and disparate datasets. In combination with our powerful analytics, our data approach ensures alerts are context-rich resulting in faster, more confident decision-making.
The Most Comprehensive Handling of Different Asset Classes
Equities
Derivatives
Digital Assets
Fixed Income
FX
Cryptocurrency
Commodities
Energy/ Power
Swaps
Benchmarks
OTC
Carbon
Visualize, Reconstruct and Understand Market Events Like Never Before
Streamlined Investigations with the Power of Evidence Cards
At the heart of our platform is the Investigation Canvas—an intuitive, visual workspace populated with Evidence Cards. These cards summarize key insights using AI, pulling together internal data, historical behavior, external references while contextualizing the anomalies visually. Whether visualized patterns with graphical interfaces or natural language summaries powered by large language models, each card empowers investigators to act swiftly and confidently.
Reconstruct the Full Trading Picture
Replay is one of our most powerful features: the ability to rebuild the entire order book over any given timeframe. Investigators can trace market activity in granular detail—down to individual orders and trades—creating a comprehensive historical view that brings clarity to complex cases.
Comprehensive Orderbook Data
- Rebuild the entire orderbook, not just partial time periods
- Complete historical trading data and alerts are accessible and exportable
- Spoofing scenarios track every order and their impact on the orderbook resulting in unparalleled alerting accuracy
Visualization & Alerting Expertise
- Powerful Visualization depicting volatility and order book manipulation
- Alert calibration tools to fine-tune parameters
- Create your own custom alerts in safe environment with deep data access
Stay at the Forefront of Regulatory Change
Protect Market Participants and Investors
Keep markets safe, uphold regulatory standards and maintain integrity throughout your jurisdiction to more effectively protect investors.
Maintain Competitive Edge
Build trust and transparency within your market to help attract liquidity and drive growth in an increasingly competitive market environment.
Focus on What Matters
Leverage a robust and flexible workflow, supported by data analysis and visualization tools, to reduce operational complexity and focus on what matters – protecting markets.
Ensure Regulatory Compliance
Benefit from the expertise of our regulatory teams, as well as our large network of customers across a broad set of jurisdictions, which is continuously integrated into the product.
The Benchmark for Surveillance
30+
Years of Surveillance Expertise
50+
Marketplaces Globally
20
Regulators Globally
Latest Award
Nasdaq has been recognized at the Chartis RiskTech100 Awards, showcasing Nasdaq’s commitment to building resilience and trust in financial markets through unified solutions and ongoing innovation.
Cross-Market, Cross-Asset, Multi-Venue
Surveillance solution, with proven capabilities that help to ensure marketplace integrity and protect investors.
Traditional Exchanges
Power your surveillance with the same technology trusted by 50+ of the world’s largest exchanges to maintain market integrity and drive investor protection.
Crypto Exchanges
Safeguard your crypto exchange with robust risk management controls and comply with regulation as it evolves with little impact to latency.
Regulators
Rapidly adapt your surveillance program to evolve with the market and address complex challenges surrounding new trading methodologies, additional asset classes and increasing data volumes.
Central Banks
Help drive economic stability and liquidity with trusted surveillance technology that enables you to monitor across asset classes and markets.
Alternative Trading Venues
Effectively monitor the order flow of alternative trading venues or internalized platforms with surveillance capabilities tailored to your unique needs.
Navigating Complex Market Surveillance - From Trends to Solutions
Ian Hawkins, Head of Nasdaq Surveillance Product Strategy, discusses the complexity of monitoring for cross-product manipulation.
Get the Latest Surveillance News, Industry Trends and Regulatory Updates
Beyond the Horizon: Market Integrity in 2026
This whitepaper distills what’s changing across regions, translates those shifts into focus areas and offers a measurable guide for benchmarking readiness.
- 2026 Global Regulatory Landscape: What are the major regulatory changes that are shaping the state of surveillance?
- Surveillance Priorities: Where should surveillance leaders focus their efforts to strengthen utility for investigators and to improve credibility amongst supervisors?
- Surveillance KPIs: How can surveillance leaders assess the performance of their surveillance programs in 2026?
FAQs
Nasdaq Market Surveillance is one of the most robust surveillance tools on the market. Rather than offer discrete pieces of software with single, directed functionalities, Nasdaq Market Surveillance presents a far-ranging suite of features, preparing you to track criminal activity across markets, asset classes, and venues.
The solution also benefits from Nasdaq’s unique position as a longtime global operator of 17 exchanges, who help to drive product innovation to evolve with the market. Our large customer network and fluid collaboration with Nasdaq’s own markets enable us to continuously to keep the product at the forefront of regulatory change.
Nasdaq Market Surveillance has the best track record and recognition among regulators, continual investment, a large community of users and the most comprehensive handling of different trading models and asset classes.
Equities, derivatives, cryptocurrency and digital assets, carbon credits, swaps, fixed income, FX, commodities, commercial real estate, electricity, and more. Nasdaq’s trading and surveillance technology is reliable and scalable, allowing you to grow and expand with the addition of new asset types as needed.
Nasdaq Market Surveillance provides markets and regulators with a robust platform to detect potentially abusive trading behaviors. Sophisticated algorithms detect patterns of abuse, market manipulation and insider trading, enabling surveillance analysts to filter only events of interest. Nasdaq Market Surveillance technology provides 70+ pre-configured alerts as well as the ability for users to tailor alerting algorithms to create their own ad hoc alerts. The system offers intuitive case focused visualizations as well as case management to help assess and manage each case.
Nasdaq offers multiple deployment options to best fit the needs of your organization, including self-hosted, managed service, and surveillance as a service. Each of the deployment options are detailed below.
Self-Hosted: In this approach the solution is deployed and operated in your environment. This can be either on your own hardware or on a third-party cloud or hosting provider.
Managed Service: In this approach the hosting and operation is handled by Nasdaq. There are two options for hosting – cloud-based or via Nasdaq’s data center. The Managed Service offering allows a similar level of bespoke solution flexibility as the self-hosted approach, the difference being that Nasdaq is hosting and operating.
Surveillance as a Service: This is similar to the Managed Service offering. However, in this deployment method, Nasdaq offers standard architecture, alerting, reporting, and modules. This is a more streamlined approach which allows lower implementation cost and faster time to market, but with less customizability.
Our Nasdaq Market Surveillance SaaS offering gives customers a set of configurable alerts and reports relevant to the market or assets traded, as well as world leading analytical tools, visualizations, and case management capabilities. The architecture allows for a more streamlined delivery, faster time to market, and lower implementation costs. At the same time, this provides greater flexibility for changes in volumes or regulatory requirements.