FINRA, Amazon Strike Cloud Deal for Market Surveillance
The Consolidated Audit Trail processes about 100 billion market events each day at 22 stock exchanges and 1,500 broker-dealers.
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s consolidated audit trail, or CAT, will now use Amazon Web Services as its cloud provider for market-surveillance data.
FINRA’s CAT processes order information for all public U.S. equities and listed options, which typically includes about 100 billion market events each day taking place at 22 stock exchanges and involving 1,500 broker-dealers.
“We are responsible for providing regulators with a consolidated view of the markets, so security, scalability, and resiliency are at the forefront of the design for the CAT platform,” said FINRA CAT CTO Scott Donaldson, in a statement. “FINRA has deep and tested experience in creating such an environment on AWS, and in view of that track record, FINRA CAT is pleased to select AWS for this major project.”
Going forward, FINRA CAT will be “the first-ever repository of all equity and listed options data for regulatory compliance purposes,” according to Amazon. It will rely on tools like AWS Key Management Service (KMS), Amazon GuardDuty, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon Aurora (for its primary database needs), Amazon Redshift (for data warehousing) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (or Amazon S3).
“The CAT will provide a single comprehensive view of U.S equities and listed options markets, as well as new tools to reconstruct market activity and maintain fair and orderly trading systems,” explained Teresa Carlson, vice president, Worldwide Public Sector at AWS.
“We are collaborating to ensure that FINRA CAT can deliver an industry leading platform that provides accessibility and transparency of capital markets data to protect investors and the integrity of the financial market,” Carlson added.