Tested and approved by Compliance

No. EarlyBird users do not have a Twitter account, just an account with EarlyBird.

We retrieve Tweets from a licensed commercial Twitter feed and distribute them to our users. There is no connection with any Twitter-account. This ensures that no-one outside your organisation can see who your users are following.

There are two main components to the regulatory compliance controls you need for Twitter:

• Ensure adequate systems and controls to prevent misuse
• Be able to demonstrate that information was in the public domain when your traders acted on it

Misuse is prevented by having no outbound communication of any type (ie no Tweeting), no person-to-person messaging, and only pulling in Tweets from unprotected, public-domain accounts.

We record all user activity and all incoming Tweet text, so it can be reviewed later. 

The Tweet recording also enables you to search and reconstruct a MiFID II trade timeline showing the time a relevant Tweet was first displayed to the user.

You can configure EarlyBird to put further automatic controls, restrictions and surveillance in place according to your firm's compliance culture. These are designed to require minimal effort from compliance without compromising risk management. 

The result is that your users get a complete professional Twitter feed that they can individually tailor to build a competitive advantage.

You are potentially opening your firm up to major risk of collusion and other market abuse.

Recent FX and LIBOR fixing scandals used other forms of chat rooms which have been closed off. Allowing traders to use Twitter.com means they could still engage in this type of activity, because Twitter allows for closed user groups, secret messaging, and deleting Tweets.

EarlyBird blocks these risks completely, and it uses a different port on your firewall, so you can enable EarlyBird while blocking all traffic to and from Twitter.com.