On March 15 and 16, the International Expert Group on Market Surveillance (IMS Group) had their kick-off at CERN in Switzerland. Hosted by Wageningen University & Research (WUR), Maastricht University, CORMEC and CERN, a total of 16 regulatory agencies from seven different countries and unions participated.

IMS Group is a collaboration between sixteen regulatory agencies across the world, aiming to jointly tackle issues and challenges related to financial market surveillance. It was established to facilitate international collaboration and bridge the gap between science and industry through co-creation and applying research findings in practice. Current members of IMS Group are ACER (European Union), ACM (Netherlands), AFM (Netherlands), Borsa Italiana (Italy), CFTC (United States), CME Group (United States), CONSOB (Italy), Deutsche Börse (Germany), EEX (Germany), ESMA (European Union), Eurex (Germany), Euronext (Netherlands), FINMA (Switzerland), FSE (Germany), ICE Futures Europe (United Kingdom) and SIX Group (Switzerland).

The goal of IMS Group is to structurally collaborate on financial market regulation challenges. Academic research and breakthroughs are combined with expert knowledge from the industry. This allows, among others, for creating consistency in financial market regulation, definitions and interpretations of the law.

The kick-off event was opened by Prof. Joachim Mnich, CERN’s Director for Research and Computing. The two days were filled with presentations from the industry and academia. Industry presented on market surveillance cases, surveillance tools and current challenges in various financial markets. Academic research was presented by members of Project HighLO. Project HighLO applies particle physics tools to financial market data and covered the topics of big data visualization and analysis, market manipulation and agent-based simulations. The event was closed by setting the future research agenda for the group.

In the ever-increasing complexity of the financial market landscape, IMS Group increases effective market surveillance and make financial markets safer and fairer.

IMS group is an extension of Project HighLO, which is the existing collaboration between CERN, Wageningen University & Research, Maastricht University and the Commodity Risk Management Expertise Centre (CORMEC). Project HighLO uses tools and methodologies from particle physics on financial market data, to identify market manipulation. Visit www.highlo.org for more information.