A US firm which developed email scanning technology in collaboration with the US intelligence community has applied it to financial services, checking for patterns to recognize hazardous behavior in brokerage trading before such activities get picked up by the regulators.
SRA International Inc makes over 90% of its $290m revenue from systems integration, mainly for US government departments, but part of its business comes from two products which monitor internal brokerage traffic and outgoing email for dangerous information.
Assentor is used by government agencies and legal firms to screen email before it is released outside the company. It scans text for blacklisted words or phrases, with the potentially libelous messages passed to a human checker for final verification. Mantas, the other package, works on a similar principle for brokers, studying traffic such as a particular broker’s total deals at the end of the day, to head off allegations of insider trading.
SRA is a privately-owned company with 1,900 employees and 20 offices across the US, although it sells worldwide through resellers, including Business Systems Group in the UK. It was founded in 1978 by Ernst Volgenau, who is still the CEO. It is based in Fairfax, Virginia, 10 miles from the CIA headquarters in Langley. SRA is a contractor with the intelligence community and has worked with most of the US intelligence agencies over the last ten years, the collaboration work in which the natural language scanning technology was developed.
