REMIT II has widened the scope of energy trade surveillance. More venues, more algorithmic trading and new exposure reporting duties now sit alongside existing MAR obligations, and case volumes remain high. ACER had 456 potential REMIT breach cases under review at the end of 2025(1) and 453 at the end of Q2 2026(2).
BroadPeak hosted a webinar, ‘REMIT II: What it means for trade surveillance in European energy markets’. We asked 180+ compliance, surveillance and risk practitioners where their trade surveillance struggles most, using three live polls. The panelists were Stilyan Kutsarov, Risk Manager at Verbund; Dr. Klaus Prommersberger, Head of Risk Management Trading Regulation at Axpo; and Patrick Güdel, Senior Expert Financial Regulation at Alpiq. Chirag Ahuja, Director at BroadPeak, moderated.
Key findings
The polls asked about three challenges: bringing new markets into surveillance, spotting blind spots, and closing alerts. Data was the one barrier that featured in the top three answers every time. Algorithmic behavior stood out as the single biggest blind spot, and alert decisions were held back mainly by missing trading context and unclear thresholds. Limited time and skills ranked last whenever it was an option, which suggests the bigger constraint is information rather than people.
Data remains the most persistent barrier
Getting the right data was the top cause of delay when firms start trading a new strategy or market (37%), closely followed by waiting for IT or vendor changes (33%). In practice, both are data problems. Even when a venue provides data, it still has to be sourced, mapped and tested before surveillance coverage is live.
Reporting obligations also run in one direction only. Regulators specify exactly how firms must report to them, yet trading venues have no matching duty to give firms data in a usable form. As REMIT brings more marketplaces into scope, many cannot yet deliver a complete surveillance data set. Monitoring systems are also behind.
In ACER's 2026 survey of exchanges, brokers and other intermediaries, about 8% had no monitoring system at all, and only 21% used professional surveillance software(3).
Algorithmic behavior is the biggest blind spot
Nearly a third of respondents (31%) named algorithmic behavior as their biggest blind spot, reflecting how far algorithmic trading has grown. Daily transactions in wholesale energy products rose from around 1 million in 2015 to over 30 million in 2025(4), and about 70% of ACER’s referrals to national regulators on suspected manipulation involved algorithms(2). These figures count referrals for investigation and do not represent confirmed breaches.
When a regulator queries an algorithmic order, the order record captures what was sent but says nothing about why. Firms need to rebuild the code version, live parameters, market inputs and accountable people as they stood at that moment. The panel suggested a simple test: pick an algorithmic order from several months ago and ask someone independent to explain it. If that takes days of detective work, treat it as a control weakness.
Alerts are hard to close without trading context
Asked what stops them closing or escalating an alert with confidence, 34% chose understanding the trading context and 29% chose unclear thresholds. ACER sees a similar pattern: 65 intermediaries said they had procedures for reporting suspicious transactions, yet only 30 actually filed a report(3).
Context often means seeing linked positions together. A small physical trade in an index window can lift the value of a much larger financial position. On its own the trade looks unremarkable, but alongside the combined exposure it reveals an incentive. That combined view gives an analyst what they need to judge whether escalation is warranted. Not every firm needs sophisticated cross market models, though. The depth of surveillance should follow the business model.
For asset information and exposure, timing is the risk
Only 12% of respondents named asset information as their biggest blind spot, yet the panel saw it as one of the hardest areas to get right. Disclosure cases reported by exchanges, brokers and other intermediaries rose from 2 in 2023 to 41 in 2025(5). A planned outage can be inside information well before the unit goes offline, so the handover from engineering to trading and compliance needs a clear trigger.
REMIT II exposure reporting raises a similar issue. Regulatory exposure figures will differ from what risk systems show, for example for options and index linked contracts. Most firms will need a reporting layer between the ETRM and the regulator.
Where to start: four questions for your team
- How long does it take to bring a new venue or product into surveillance coverage?
- Could someone independent explain an algorithmic order from six months ago?
- Can analysts see combined physical and financial exposure when they review an alert?
- Is there a documented trigger for when engineering information must reach compliance?
Control what you can
Effective surveillance depends on the data behind it and the context around it. Firms have no say over how venues publish data or how fast REMIT scope expands, so the focus belongs on how quickly they connect new sources, link physical and financial activity, and give analysts the context to act with confidence.
One data set, three compliance tasks
BroadPeak connects data from more than 100 exchanges and brokers and brings trade, order and position data into one platform, so the same data supports three compliance tasks:
- Trade surveillance: monitors physical and financial trades together, linking E/CTRM positions with exchange orders to surface cross market patterns. Machine learning prioritizes alerts based on how your analysts resolved past ones.
- Position limits: calculates positions the way exchanges and regulators do, using limit data taken directly from exchanges, and flags issues before a limit is breached.
- Regulatory reporting: automates submissions under regimes including REMIT, EMIR and MiFID II, with a time stamped record of what was sent and when.
To discuss how this applies to your firm, contact our team.
Source
- ACER REMIT Quarterly Q4 2025, p. 7, Figure 1
- ACER REMIT Quarterly Q2 2026, p. 6 and Figure 9
- ACER, Market surveillance by persons professionally arranging or executing transactions: arrangements, systems and procedures, 8 May 2026, pp. 26, 30 and 50
- ACER REMIT Quarterly Q1 2026, p. 10
- ACER, National regulatory authorities’ activities related to suspicious transactions and order reports, 8 May 2026, p. 11, Table 1
