[By NBC-1TV H. J Yook]The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc. (Nasdaq:NDAQ), BM&FBOVESPA, the Brazilian Securities, Commodities and Futures (BVMF3) Exchange, and BM&FBOVESPA Market Supervision (BSM), have announced the official go-live of NASDAQ OMX‘s SMARTS Integrity market surveillance platform across Brazil’s equities, commodities and futures. BM&FBOVESPA's Equities market has been working with SMARTS since 2011, and now the Commodities and Futures markets will be monitored on the PUMA Trading System platform.

“This go-live is a milestone for both BM&FBOVESPA and the Brazil financial industry as a whole,” said Cicero Vieira, Chief Operating Officer of BM&FBOVESPA. “Since Brazilian trading activity has grown in importance in the portfolio strategies of investors worldwide, it is crucial to provide local and international players with market surveillance tools that are aligned with the fully transparent and centralized order driven price discovery across all products in our marketplace. We aim to proactively enforce regulation and safety addressed by our regulators and reign in market abuse activities. Our technical collaboration with NASDAQ OMX underscores this commitment.”

BM&FBOVESPA and BSM, the Brazilian self-regulatory organization in charge of BM&FBOVESPA market surveillance and supervising market participants, are now equipped with an automated solution for market oversight, which also strengthens their current surveillance capabilities. Utilizing SMARTS Integrity will ensure the Brazilian marketplace has a comprehensive portfolio of alerting scenarios across a wide range of market behaviors, for detection of even the most sophisticated trading scenarios. SMARTS Integrity already supports some of the world‘s largest markets and is well-positioned to ensure BM&FBOVESPA’s future growth plans as well as to assist BSM in its ongoing enforcement of regulatory initiatives.

“Since the global financial crisis we have had a significant increase in self-regulatory activities,” said Marcos Torres, BSM Chief Regulatory Officer. “With SMARTS Integrity now operating across several markets, equities and derivatives, we are already gaining in efficiency and detection efforts, not to mention a more integrated analysis process.”

“Market transparency is key to a healthy global marketplace,” said Paul McKeown, vice president of Market Technology, NASDAQ OMX. “We are committed to building the industry's leading market surveillance technologies to combat market abuse, especially as we continue to face a constantly changing regulatory landscape. We are very proud of our partnership with BM&FBOVESPA and BSM to detect irregularities and market abuse in the Brazilian marketplace, and look forward to growing this partnership in the future.”