Surveillance cost comparison
The full cost of your surveillance setup
Licence fees are only part of what surveillance costs. The bigger share is usually your team's time: reviewing alerts, closing false positives, and doing work outside the system that the system should do. Enter your own figures below to see the true cost over three years, and how it compares with eflow.
Your team
The people who work on trade and communications surveillance, and what their time costs.
Where your team's time goes
How long each task takes your team today. A rough estimate is fine; these figures show what your current setup really costs in people's time.
| Task | Hours a day | Cost a year |
|---|---|---|
| Reviewing alertsInvestigating and dispositioning alerts in the system | hrs | |
| Closing out false positivesAlerts that turn out to be nothing | hrs | |
| Case management outside the systemSpreadsheets, email trails, saving evidence to shared drives | hrs | |
| Searching for data outside the systemNews stories, connected trading, orders in other systems | hrs | |
| Other surveillance workWorked out for you: total hours less the tasks above | ||
| Total per person, per day |
| Task | Hours a month | Cost a year |
|---|---|---|
| Building reportsBoard MI, committee packs, regulator requests, assembled by hand | hrs | |
| Reviewing and tuning parametersChecking thresholds still fit your business, documenting changes | hrs |
What your surveillance costs to run today
For each area, choose how you cover it today. If you use a vendor, enter the annual fee. If you built it yourselves, you'll be asked what it takes to keep it running.
| Area | How you cover it today | Annual vendor fee |
|---|---|---|
| Trade surveillance | £ | |
| Best execution monitoring | £ | |
| eComms surveillance | £ |
Cover everything you built yourselves together. Include the people who maintain it, not the team reviewing alerts; their time is already in step 2.
Cost of the eflow solution
Copy these figures from eflow's proposal. Leave a module blank if it isn't included. The eflow subscription starts when implementation begins.
Switching over
Year 1 includes the move: your team's project time, and the 14 weeks of onboarding, when the eflow subscription has started but today's licence fees and staff time continue.
Three years, year by year
Break-even time saving
Your own assumption, applied to all the surveillance time in step 2 from go-live. It starts at zero; move it to test different outcomes.
Three-year saving at this assumption
–Hidden cost of staff time
Hours given back to your team
Pays for itself
Return on eflow spend
Three-year saving ÷ three-year eflow cost| Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | 3 years |
|---|
How this is worked out. Hourly cost is salary ÷ (working hours a day × working days a year). Daily tasks are costed as hours × people × working days × hourly cost; monthly tasks as hours × 12 × hourly cost. Licence fees grow with the renewal price rise.
Year 1. The eflow subscription starts when implementation begins. eflow's average onboarding is 14 weeks; during that time, current system costs and today's staff time continue alongside the eflow subscription. Internal project cost is people × days × daily cost (salary ÷ working days). Any time saving applies from go-live.
In-house systems. IT time is costed at the IT salary entered: hours a month × hourly cost, and change days × daily cost. Infrastructure, data and validation costs rise with the annual price rise. Not included: the risk of relying on the one or two people who understand how a homegrown system works.
Time saving. eflow makes no assumption about time saved. The break-even figure is the share of today's surveillance time eflow would need to save for the three-year cost to match staying as you are. The slider applies your own assumption, from go-live. Freed-up time is shown as a cost; whether it becomes a cash saving depends on how the time is redeployed. Figures exclude VAT and are illustrative, not a quotation.