The Financial Conduct Authority has chosen Sopra Steria to deliver a digital regulatory market data processing platform to ensure that the trading reporting activity of investment firms remains compliant.
The six year contract will support the FCA’s role in regulating firms, as well as covering requirements that will be introduced under the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II).
Under MiFID II trading venues and investment firms will be required to submit data on a wide range of financial instruments to the FCA.
Sopra Steria’s Regulatory Support Service solution has been chosen by the FCA in order to meet stringent validation times and in order to reduce implementation and running costs.
Georgina Philippou, Chief Operating Officer, FCA, said: "Having reliable, robust and scalable market data processing solutions is critical to our role in regulating capital markets."
The platform being used is a big data solution that uses open source application components and is hosted on Amazon Web Services. It is designed to be able to handle millions of transactions per day, the receipt and deliver of which will be guaranteed by Axway, which assures the exchange of files between submitting entities.
The FCA and other stakeholders will work to validate and store the transaction reports in order to ensure that they meet the MiFID II rules.
To gain transparency into the billions of transaction reports that are being stored, the reporting warehouse facility will interrogate the data.
John Torrie, UK Chief Executive, Sopra Steria, said: "This strategic big data solution will not only offer a ground-breaking service to a key client of Sopra Steria, but also the potential to reduce the cost of financial regulation in both the UK and around Europe."
Sopra Steria said that the benefits of its platform will help it to explore further MiFID II opportunities such as providing a validation service directly to investment firms that need to report to the FCA.
MiFID II will come into force from the 3rd of January 2017.
