Sopra Steria, selected by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to deliver a new digital regulatory market data processing platform. The exclusive six-year contract will see Sopra Steria supply a complete solution, which ensures investment firms’ trading reporting activity remains compliant.

Based in a major international financial centre, the FCA has a critical role in maintaining the integrity of global capital markets. As part of this, the new market data processing platform will support the FCA’s on-going regulation of firms, as well as encompassing new requirements  under the forthcoming EU regulation entitled the ‘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. In order to meet stringent validation times and deliver value for money by reducing implementation and running costs, the FCA required an innovative offering utilising the latest digital technology.

Following a competitive tender process, the FCA chose Sopra Steria’s Regulatory Support Service solution which incorporates best-of-breed industry partners. The platform is a big data solution using cutting-edge 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. The solution has been designed to be multi-tenanted to enable others to benefit from the platform.

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.”

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.  Following a rigorous selection process, we have chosen Sopra Steria to help us meet our rapidly changing requirements in this area, and we very much look forward to working with them.”

Melba Foggo, Managing Director of Sopra Steria Financial Services, said: “This contract is a key win for my team and further supports our already strong relationship with the FCA. This deal, with an initial six-year term, has now placed us at the forefront of MiFID II developments, cementing our aim to become one of the prime providers of regulatory trading solutions. The high-speed data ingestion and processing capability has far-reaching implications for the investment industry. It will allow us to explore adjacent MiFID II opportunities, such as providing a validation service directly to investment firms who need to report to the FCA.”