Smarts Group, the world leader in real-time market surveillance and operational control for exchanges, regulators and brokers, announce the new appointments of Thomas Jones as Chief Executive Officer and Magnus Almqvist as General Manager of SMARTS Europe. Thomas is a founding director of the Smarts Group and sits on the Board of the SMARTS Group. Magnus joined the organisation in early 2007, having previously held similar positions at Atos Euronext Markets Solutions, LSE and OMX.
Dr Michael Aitken, Chairman of Smarts Group, says the new appointments are planned to coincide with a significant increase in SMARTS’ product range:
"At a time when we are also significantly expanding our product range with SMARTSOnline (our fully outsourced surveillance service) it is appropriate we also strengthen our human capital resources. Thomas Jones has unparalleled experience in the domain being a co-founder of SMARTS and having spent the last five years working with SMARTS major clients (LSE, SWX and OMX) in Europe. Magnus Almqvist is the third in a series of new senior management appointments who bring a carefully chosen array of external management experience to the SMARTS Group.
As Smarts Group’s CEO, Thomas is responsible for global business strategy, ensuring that the firm’s ongoing restructuring, research and development is aligned with customer needs and the company’s technological strategy. He says:
“In recent years, our customer needs have changed. While our functional and surveillance expertise remains prized, our focus is increasingly on operational stability and high performance to handle real-time surveillance of ultra high trading volumes. Being a key supplier to the daily operations of stock exchanges requires both an in-depth understanding of the business processes of our customers and the ability to predictably deliver the systems and services to support those processes and other customer projects.
Going forward, Smarts Group’s deep understanding of her clients' needs gives us the ability to anticipate market requirements and lead with product development. We will continue to enhance the SMARTS platform to deliver greater efficiencies in the areas of market supervision and oversight for financial institutions worldwide. In a cross-market cross-border world, our system offers a standard that facilitates information sharing at a technological level.
The SMARTS name is a well established brand in the global financial market, I look forward to building stronger brand equity amongst our existing and new accounts.”
Magnus Almqvist has been appointed General Manager Europe and will be responsible for the operations in Europe and the Middle East, particularly the support and maintenance delivered to existing clients and new sales.
Magnus adds:
“SMARTS is in a very interesting space with a very strong market leading surveillance product with an impressive array of clients including many Tier 1 exchanges in Europe. I am thrilled at the opportunity to further strengthen the presence in the region by ensuring we provide a world class support working closely with our customers whilst continuing increasing the customer base".
Smarts Group’s executive management team today consists of Thomas Jones (CEO), Murray McInnes (CFO), Stuart Frith (Global Head of Customer Services), Magnus Almqvist (General Manager Europe) and Audris Siow (Head of Business Development).
Both the new CEO and General Manager Europe appointments are effective immediately.
About Smarts Group:
Smarts Group is the global leader in real-time financial market surveillance technology and services, dedicated to delivering market integrity through efficient and proven systems solutions and services to the financial community. Smarts Group cater to all supervision, surveillance and regulatory aspects of the securities business value chain – providing business critical trading surveillance and operational control systems in over 29 national exchanges and regulators and more than 50 member firms (through Capital Markets Surveillance Services Pty Ltd) across 21 countries, playing integral advisory roles in setting international surveillance and compliance standards, and educating and developing the next generation of people and platforms for international cross-market integrity.
In Europe, SMARTS users are the London Stock Exchange, SWX, virt-x, the Helsinki Stock Exchange, the Oslo Børs, Stockholmsbörsen, Copenhagen Stock Exchange, and the Iceland Stock Exchange. Elsewhere, SMARTS users include exchanges in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, United Arab Emirates and Russia; Regulators include the Monetary Authority of Singapore, The Malaysian Securities Commission, the Securities and Exchange Board of India, the Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong, the UAE Securities and Commodities Authority, the Nigeria Securities Commission and the Russian Central Bank. For more information, please visit www.smartsgroup.com .
SMARTS Group is also a major sponsor of the Capital Markets Cooperative Research Centre (www.cmcrc.com), the world’s largest research centre (with over 100 academics and postgraduate students) devoted exclusively to research in market integrity.
