UK’s Financial Conduct Authority selects Sopra Steria for new regulatory platform
Georgina Philippou, FCA
Paris-based Sopra Steria has been selected by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to deliver a new digital regulatory market data processing platform in an “exclusive” six-year contract.
The new platform will support the FCA’s on-going regulation of firms, as well as encompassing new requirements under the forthcoming Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II).
Under MiFID II trading venues and investment firms will be required to submit market data on a wide range of financial instruments to the FCA.
Georgina Philippou, COO, FCA, says: “Having reliable, robust and scalable market data processing solutions is critical to our role in regulating capital markets.”
Sopra says its platform is a big data solution using open source application components and hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
It will be able to “handle millions of transactions per day”, the receipt and delivery of which are “guaranteed” by Axway which assures the exchange of files between submitting entities, the FCA and other stakeholders.
Powered by DataStax Enterprise Max it will validate and store all transaction reports, ensuring they meet the MiFID II rules.
It is estimated that the Regulatory Support Service will store billions of transaction reports over the initial six-year term of the deal.
Its reporting warehouse facility will interrogate large amounts of data with the purpose of giving the FCA “greater” transparency, and therefore a “larger breadth and scope of information on reported transactions”.
Nothing mythical here
In a recent and separate deal, Sopra said it plans a tie-up with Cassiopae, a developer of specialised finance management software.
Sopra plans to acquire, through its subsidiary Sopra Banking Software, about 75% of KSEOP, Cassiopae’s holding company.
