No one likes to think that their behaviour is predictable or transparent but that is the implication of a study by Nice Actimize, which found that the majority of financial compliance, risk and IT professionals think that behavioural analytics detects conduct related threats that usually cannot be discovered by traditional analytics.

The report on the Nice Actimize survey argues that using behaviour analytics can signicantly transform existing surveillance programmes. Using data on the behaviour of employees, together with traditional data, can speed up the detection and investigation of possible misconduct, such as market abuse, insider trading, collusion or benchmark manipulation.

Behavioural analytics generally targets data about an employee's activities (trades, orders, P&L), HR activities (access to the building, vacation patterns, T&E, etc) as well as communications (meta data about communications such as frequency and timing of communications, email attachments, duration of phone calls, rather than the content of emails and calls).

The graph below, by Nice Actimize, shows the data that the survey's respondents would like to measure:

And some of the survey's key findings include:

• 82 per cent of respondents agree or strongly agree that behavioural analytics can uncover hidden threats that model-based analytics aren’t designed to detect;
• 91 per cent believe that using behavioural analytics accelerates the investigation process when used in conjunction with model-based analytics; and
• 42 per cent expect to implement behavioural analytics in the next 12 months.