Sebi looking to boost social media surveillance through web intelligence tool

Sebi is looking to boost surveillance of social media and other platforms through a web intelligence tool using artificial intelligence and data analytics to probe violations of various securities laws by individuals, groups and other entities.

In this regard, the capital markets regulator has invited Expression of Interest (EOI) from solution providers to implement, install and maintain a 'Web Intelligence Tool', according to a public notice.

Noting that the internet usage has risen exponentially over the last few years which resulted in production of immense amounts of unstructured publicly available data on the web, Sebi said this unstructured data has the potential to provide deep investigation insights about various entities, individuals, groups and topics related to violations of various securities laws.

Also Read | Gold prices dip as Fed policy meet takes centrestage

Manual extraction and analysis of massive amounts of unstructured publicly available data in order to reveal actionable insights is usually time consuming, tedious and has limited efficacy.

"Sebi is looking for a Web Intelligence Tool which provides AI (Artificial Intelligence) based solutions to extract and analyse unstructured publicly available data to gain deep intelligence insights about various entities, individuals, groups and topics," as per the notice.

The new tool is expected to save time, ease the analysis process and improve efficiency in the overall investigation process.

The regulator said that the tool should be able to gather unstructured publicly available data from the web, including public websites, social media platforms, open source databases among others, in respect of relevant entities, individuals, groups and topics.

The tool should enable investigators to easily analyse massive amounts of complex unstructured data using its AI and data analytics capabilities.

It should have capability to visualise the data in the form of a network chart to find insights about connections among relevant entities, individuals and groups. The visualisation should be interactive and allow users to work with the data as per user requirement.

Also Read | Oil prices climb on weak dollar, supply concerns

The tool should generate ready-made reports based on the defined report templates, and the users should be able to create and modify report templates without any coding requirement.

Interested parties can submit the bids by October 3, the regulator said.

Recently, Sebi has unearthed a large number of insider trading and front-running cases where 'mule accounts' were being used with the help of latest technology tools.