Lisa Balter Saacks is President, Trillium Surveyor.
What were the key themes for your business in 2025?
In 2025, our primary focus was helping firms modernize oversight through better data, stronger analytics, and more unified systems. Across the industry, compliance and trading teams still manage trade surveillance and best execution analytics in separate environments, often relying on different data sets and inconsistent workflows.
A key theme for us was delivering a best execution analytics offering that matches the depth, quality, and rigor of our trade surveillance platform. Firms should not have to choose between strong surveillance and meaningful execution analysis or manage multiple vendors to achieve both. Especially as expectations around best execution increase, firms need clear, defensible analytics that make execution quality measurable and explainable.
By bringing trade surveillance and best execution analytics together within the same platform and data foundation, we aimed to reduce fragmentation and enable more consistent, scalable oversight as market structure evolves.
Another important theme was investing ahead of market structure change. Throughout 2025, we expanded our surveillance coverage across digital assets, 24/5 trading, and most recently prediction markets, recognizing that trading activity no longer fits neatly into traditional hours or products.
What was the highlight of 2025?
The highlight of 2025 was the launch of our Best Execution Analytics engine. Firms are under growing pressure to demonstrate execution quality with rigor and consistency, yet many still rely on quarterly reviews or static reports that provide limited insight.
Our focus was on shifting best execution analysis to a daily, data-driven process. By continuously analyzing large volumes of trade data, firms can identify trends and issues earlier rather than uncovering them after the fact.
This approach delivers measurable value across both trading and compliance. Trading teams gain clearer, more timely insight into execution performance, while compliance teams benefit from repeatable, defensible analysis that supports governance expectations.
What trends are getting underway that people may not know about but will be important?
One important trend is oversight moving closer to the trading workflow. Compliance and trading teams are increasingly aligned around shared data and analytics rather than operating in separate systems and long review cycles.
We are also seeing a clear shift from periodic reviews to more continuous analysis. Quarterly best execution reviews, for example, are no longer sufficient in markets that move faster and operate across more venues and trading hours. Firms are looking for daily, repeatable analytics that provide earlier insight and stronger governance.
Finally, oversight is expanding into newer market structures sooner than in the past. Extended trading hours, digital assets, and event-driven products are prompting firms to think about market integrity and monitoring at the outset, rather than after these markets are established. We believe that mindset shift will be critical as market structure continues to evolve.
What are your clients’ pain points and how have they changed from one year ago?
Client pain points today have expanded beyond oversight as regulators continue to place a much stronger emphasis on the processes firms have in place. Firms are expanding into new markets, assets, and trading models and are working to manage growing complexity without adding friction.
Before now, many firms were focused on adding tools to address individual requirements. Today, the conversation has shifted toward simplifying infrastructure and ensuring consistency across trading and compliance. Clients are looking for technology that supports multiple oversight needs within a single platform backed by reliable data and intuitive workflows.
Ultimately, firms want systems that adapt alongside market structure changes, rather than forcing teams to constantly adjust their processes. Our focus has been on delivering that flexibility while keeping oversight efficient, transparent, and scalable.
