Use theartificial intelligence to identify possible market abuse, starting with theinsider trading. This is the goal of a project that Consob is developing in collaboration with the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. Thanks to new technologies, in fact, it will be possible analyze investor behavior before particular price sensitive events occur, bringing out any anomalies compared to the past. In essence, through these tools it will be possible to isolate suspected cases of insider trading, the abuse of privileged information.
The first tests are encouraging: they report anomalous trading behavior one month before the official price sensitive communication. Furthermore, Consob is also using artificial intelligence to supervise cryptocurrencies and the grenwashing phenomenon, to unmask products presented as ecological but which are not.
Consob: 2019 pirated sites for investments blocked since 720
Meanwhile, using traditional methods, Consob has blacked out a total of 720 sites dedicated to the illegal collection of savings. The count starts from 2019, the year in which this new power was attributed to the Commission.
Only in 2021, according to the latest Consob annual report, the Commission took 409 law enforcement actions, including 183 measures to shut down sites offering abusive financial services.
In 2021 457 reports: 67% for suspected insider trading
As regards market abuse, the Commission received 457 suspicious transaction reports last year (in line with the previous year, when 455 were received). As many as 67% of the cases (compared to 53% in the previous year) concerned possible episodes of insider trading, while hypotheses of operational manipulation stopped at 32% (from 40% in 2020). On the issue of market abuse, Consob has initiated administrative sanctions against 49 natural persons.
There were 2.574 complaints, slightly down on the 2.778 of the previous year. Furthermore, the number of complaints attributable to issuers and intermediaries dropped significantly (from 1.567 in 2020 to 974 in 2021), while those relating to unauthorized parties increased significantly (from 758 in 2020 to 1.138 in 2021) and the violations most frequently reported concern hypotheses of illegal activity and anomalies in the provision of investment services.
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