FINRA CAT selects AWS for Consolidated Audit Trail

FINRA CAT, LLC, a subsidiary of Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), announced today it has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud provider for the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT). The CAT will allow regulators to improve securities market surveillance by creating an extensive audit trail of order information for all U.S. equity securities and listed options across U.S. markets and trading venues. Leveraging AWS’s storage, compute, database, analytics, and security services, CAT ingests more than 100 billion market events per day, pulling together data from 22 stock exchanges and 1,500 broker dealer firms, enabling the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Self-Regulatory Organizations (SROs) to analyze CAT data.

FINRA CAT is relying on the breadth and depth of the AWS portfolio, including Amazon Aurora (for its primary database needs), Amazon Redshift (for data warehousing), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), as well as AWS’s unparalleled security and compliance capabilities to develop the platform. By using Amazon EMR (for data analysis) and Amazon Redshift (to analyze data in Amazon S3), FINRA CAT will be able to provide insights on market trading activities to Self-Regulatory Organizations (SROs) and the SEC so that they can identify anomalies in market data in order to better detect and prosecute illegal market activity and protect investors. The CAT will be the first-ever repository of all equity and listed options data for regulatory compliance purposes, leveraging AWS security capabilities such as AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), Amazon Guard Duty, and AWS CloudTrail for the security of sensitive financial data.

“We are responsible for delivering regulators with a consolidated view of the markets, so security, scalability, and resiliency are at the forefront of our design for the CAT platform,” said Scott Donaldson, FINRA CAT Chief Technology Officer. “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.”

FINRA began their journey with AWS in 2012, starting with migration – and are now all-in on the cloud. With over 97% of their applications and over 99% of data in the cloud, FINRA has taken a cloud-first approach to IT management and is trailblazing the way enterprises and financial services organizations use cloud technologies. FINRA uses the cloud’s instant scalability to manage 500,000 compute nodes, ingest 7 terabytes of data, and perform ½ trillion validation checks – on a daily basis. Read more in the FINRA CAT press release, and learn more about FINRA and AWS by watching the AWS Global Summit New York 2019 Keynote with Steve Randich of FINRA, checking out the FINRA case study, checking out the FINRA data validation case study, and reading FINRA blog posts.