SteelEye: Initiation of Coverage

GAII Intelligence defines the Risk, Compliance & Surveillance market as software that applies AI to the supervisory obligations of investment firms, banks and trading venues: capturing and retaining communications and trading records, detecting misconduct and market abuse, reviewing regulated content, and evidencing those controls to regulators. Buyers are chief compliance officers, heads of surveillance and conduct risk, and the technology and records teams that support them.

Capabilities we treat as mandatory

• Complete, defensible capture: records of every in-scope channel or trading system, reconciled and retained to regulatory standards such as SEC 17a-4.
• Explainable detection: every alert or finding traceable to the policy, rule or signal that produced it, in a form a regulator can examine.
• Institutional data handling: a stated position on where client data goes, how long it is held, and whether it is used for model training.

Capabilities we treat as differentiating

• False-positive reduction: measurable cuts in alert volume without loss of true positives, with a disclosed method.
• Agentic triage: agents that disposition first-level alerts and assemble cases under human supervision.
• Holistic coverage: communications, trade and conduct data analysed together rather than in separate tools.
• AI-channel governance: capture and supervision of employees' use of AI assistants as a regulated channel.

SteelEye competes with Behavox and Smarsh in combined communications and trade surveillance, with Global Relay and Theta Lake in capture and archive, and with Nasdaq SMARTS, NICE Actimize, Eventus and TradingHub in trade surveillance.

The following are the capabilities and characteristics that, in our assessment, most distinguish SteelEye within the Risk, Compliance & Surveillance market. Each is drawn from publicly documented product capability, published interviews with management, or independent review.

• Integrated surveillance: Trade, order and communications data analysed together in one case view, a combination few peers offer natively.
• Channel and feed coverage: 85 communication channels, voice transcription and 50+ trade data handlers including Charles River, Aladdin and Bloomberg EMSX.
• Regulatory breadth: Archive, best execution and MiFID II reporting alongside surveillance; FundApps adds disclosure monitoring and filings.
• Assurance: ISO 27001 since 2023, renewed in 2025 with A-LIGN, and a SOC 2 report covering all five trust criteria.
• Scale: Group ARR above £50m and about 350 clients in 18 countries (company), with FTV Capital backing.
• Data terms: Clients own their data, with no exit fees or export charges (company).

The following are factors that prospective clients should weigh, and areas where our public review did not find sufficient evidence to reach a settled view. Several are common across vendors at this stage of the market and are not specific to SteelEye. We encourage prospective clients to raise each of them directly with the company; we have done the same, and will update this note as answers arrive.

• AI disclosure: The models behind Compliance CoPilot are not named and no evaluation is published.
• Shipping velocity: We did not locate a dated AI release in 2025 or 2026; "agentic AI" and auto-close are listed without detail.
• Governance documentation: SSO, role-based access, audit logging and a no-training commitment were not documented publicly.
• Integration: The FundApps merger closed in November 2025 and a new group CEO started in March 2026; the combined roadmap is not yet published.
• Evidence: The 90% review-time reduction and false-positive claims are vendor-reported.
• Trial and pricing: No public pricing and no trial located.
• Archive assurance: No third-party attestation of 17a-4 compliance located.

SteelEye Limited was founded in London in 2017 by Matt Smith, who remains its CEO, and has offices in London, New York, Singapore, Braga and Bangalore. On 3 November 2025 it signed a merger with FundApps, a London compliance-monitoring company founded in 2010; Frederic Ceyte, formerly CEO of Finance Active and Addactis, became CEO of the FundApps group in March 2026.

SteelEye raised a $21m Series B led by Ten Coves Capital in September 2022, with Fidelity International Strategic Ventures, Illuminate Financial and Beacon Equity Partners. FTV Capital, an existing FundApps investor, made an additional equity investment at the merger on undisclosed terms. The group reports ARR above £50m and about 250 staff; SteelEye's standalone revenue is not disclosed.

Company-reported figures are shown as such and are not independently verified. Verification is carried into the vendor questionnaire.

SteelEye offers surveillance, archive and reporting modules on one data platform. Figure 2 sets out our assessment of how it maps onto the compliance and surveillance workflow.

Integrated surveillance

Trade and communications surveillance in one case view, including cross-product manipulation.

Data platform

17a-4 WORM archive with eDiscovery, legal hold and trade reconstruction.

Compliance CoPilot

LLM-based alert scoring, resolution suggestions and rationale (2023; trade surveillance 2024).

Best execution and reporting

Best execution and TCA, MiFID II transaction reporting; FundApps disclosure monitoring.

Scope of the product today

We did not locate a public API, published model providers or a dated agentic release.

Compliance CoPilot uses large language models to score each flagged communication or trade alert, suggest a resolution category and give a written rationale, learning from reviewers' accept-or-revise feedback. SteelEye also lists contextual "neural" detection, AI-assisted filtering and auto-close.

Model providers are not disclosed and no evaluation is published; the 90% review-time reduction is vendor-reported.

SteelEye captures 85 communication channels — email, chat, mobile messaging, financial messaging, voice and collaboration tools — and 50+ trade and order feeds into a 17a-4 compliant repository with reconciliation.

Voice is transcribed through AWS, Deepgram or Intelligent Voice; detection combines market-abuse scenarios, an extended lexicon and CoPilot.

SteelEye fits compliance teams at asset managers, hedge funds and brokers that want one vendor for surveillance, archive and reporting, with trade and communications evidence in the same investigation.

API access and the combined FundApps roadmap are not yet documented.

SteelEye holds ISO 27001 certification, renewed with A-LIGN in 2025, and a SOC 2 report, and offers public or private cloud deployment. Figure 3 sets out what our public review located.

We would encourage buyers to request the SOC 2 report type and period, SSO and audit-logging documentation, model providers and a no-training clause.

The offsetting factors are certification and scale: two external standards in place and a group of about 350 clients.

SteelEye does not publish pricing. It states that clients own their data and pay no exit fees or export charges.

Buyers should seek quantified references and clarity on pricing across the merged product set.

SteelEye sits in the Emerging quadrant of the segment matrix, with investment utility (X 7.18) close to the boundary and AI and enterprise evidence (Y 5.82) behind.

GAII Risk, Compliance & Surveillance coverage, 20 October 2026, scored on the segment variant of Data & Content and Workflow Fit; not directly comparable with Research & Intelligence scores.

11.1 Where SteelEye is strongest relative to peers

• Against archive specialists, on integrated trade surveillance.
• Against trade-surveillance specialists, on communications and archive.
• Against point solutions, on regulatory reporting breadth.

11.2 Areas of narrower functional focus

SteelEye has built breadth and data coverage ahead of AI disclosure.

• AI: models undisclosed; no evaluation.
• Velocity: no dated 2025–26 AI release.
• Governance: SSO and no-training not documented.
• Integration: merger in progress.

Scores are on a 0–10 scale. Each dimension score is the mean of its sub-criteria, and the GAII Overall Score is the weighted mean of the six dimensions. The detailed sub-criteria scores that build each dimension are set out in Appendix A.

These are the areas where our public review did not find sufficient evidence to form a settled view. We have put them to the company and will update this note when they are answered. Prospective clients may find them a useful agenda for their own evaluation call.

• Which models power Compliance CoPilot, and under what terms.
• Whether client data trains any model.
• SOC 2 report type and period.
• SSO/SAML, SCIM and audit logging.
• Agentic AI and auto-close: scope and release dates.
• Combined FundApps–SteelEye roadmap and branding.
• SteelEye standalone revenue and client count.
• Third-party attestation of 17a-4 compliance.
• False-positive reduction methodology.
• Public API availability.
• Pricing.
• Quantified client references.

This note is an assessment of a vendor against a defined framework, not a recommendation to buy or to decline. The following are the considerations we would put at the centre of an evaluation of SteelEye specifically.

If you run compliance or surveillance

• Test integrated trade-and-comms cases on your own data.
• Pilot CoPilot against current triage.
• Confirm the post-merger roadmap.

If you are responsible for technology or vendor risk

• Open with Figure 3; request SOC 2 type and SSO.
• Ask for model providers and data-use terms.
• Review connector coverage for your OMS.

If you are assessing the category rather than the company

• Trade and communications surveillance are converging.
• Regtech consolidation is creating multi-product groups.
• LLM triage is becoming standard but rarely evaluated.

Each dimension score in Section 12 is the mean of the sub-criteria below. Data & Content and Investment Workflow Fit use the Risk, Compliance & Surveillance segment variant.