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January 23, 2019 at 01:45 PM
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority said Wednesday that “exceptional market volatility” helped the broker-dealer self-regulator generate an unprecedented amount of processing volume in 2018 — 66.7 billion electronic records per day, an 87.4% increase over the average daily volume in 2017.
FINRA’s “pioneering” cloud strategy allowed the regulator to handle the “record-setting” volume smoothly while continuing to perform vigorous regulatory oversight of securities trading.
FINRA’s “mission of protecting investors depends on our staying current with the market and continuously monitoring and analyzing for potential suspicious activity,” said Steve Randich, FINRA’s chief information officer, in a statement. “Cloud storage and processing responds instantly to elastic demand, providing our market-surveillance analysts with access to petabytes of data in seconds or minutes, even during periods of uninterrupted record-breaking activity.”
On a daily basis, FINRA receives order and trade data regarding 42,000 investment products from 17 securities exchanges, more than 60 alternative trading systems and almost 1,400 broker-dealer firms.
FINRA notes that it runs “almost 200 algorithmic ‘patterns’ to look for more than 300 potential threat scenarios including market manipulation, fraud, customer abuse, insider trading, abusive short selling, inaccurate trade reporting and other rule violations.”
