Webinar

The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) is introducing new Market Sounding Guidelines, coming into effect on 02 May 2025. The guidelines aim to bring greater structure, oversight, and accountability to market sounding activities.

Electronic communications surveillance (eComms surveillance) is often manually intensive, time consuming, and highly reactive. The 2024 Surveillance Benchmarking report published by 1LoD shows the average surveillance team size consists of around 103 employees—who spend a massive 81% of their time simply reviewing alerts.

Effective surveillance plays a crucial role for compliance in maintaining regulatory compliance and safeguarding the firm from the effects of illicit employee behavior that leads to market abuse and market manipulation. Regulators fully expect that firms to have effective controls in place to monitor employee behavior and transactions for non-compliance, whether inadvertent or intentional.

Solid policies and procedures are the backbone of an effective compliance program, providing a framework for the consistent application of rules and requirements across the organization and third parties that the firm conducts business with.

But just having a library of policies isn't enough. The key is having policies and procedures that are clear, actionable, defensible, adhered to across the firm and consistently updated to keep pace with regulatory change. In the complex and volatile business environment that financial services firms are operating in, that goal is often easier said than done.