"Best Execution Compliance Automation” is hardly the most exciting project title, but Z/Yen have completed an enormous, exciting project with Sun Microsystems and the London Stock Exchange to test the feasibility of identifying share anomalies using PropheZy in order to help financial firms comply with the best execution requirements in the European Union’s Market in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID – pronounced like TRiFFID, hmm). The project, BECA as we call it, built a prototype compliance workstation that has been a huge success with four brokers - “The prototype workstation, with all the information about each trade and the drill- down functionality is just the sort of tool we would use”. The work involved sifting 190,000 trades worth around £54 billion and asking PropheZy to say which ones looked odd (could have told ya about the team before you started – ed). BECA will feature in two June articles for the Journal of Risk Finance, is on display at Sun Live and has already been trailed in Banking Technology.

Other applications for PropheZy grow almost daily. PropheZy has recently been tested on the prediction of inbound call volumes to a call centre, the identification of trademarks that are likely to be refused registration and the identification of counterparties to equity trades. Much to the frustration of after-hours staff, it still fails to predict the lottery...