We attended the Fall STAC summits in Chicago and London recently, and will be at STAC New York on November 7th. At STAC we’ve been talking about Provenance™️, a new feature available now in all our DAG™️10X cards and coming to our EndaceProbe™️ Network Recorders early next year.
New MFID 2 regulatory technology standards (known as RTS 25) for recording trade data will impose tough new standards on HFT firms operating in the European market. Under the new regulations, traders must ensure that timestamps on recorded trade data are accurate to at least 1 microsecond granularity and synchronised to UTC with a maximum divergence of less than 100 microseconds. They must also be able to demonstrate traceability to UTC by documenting the system design, functioning and specifications. There’s a few technical hurdles to clear to meet those requirements and Provenance is how we ensure you don’t knock any over.
The big problem here is that timing accuracy can change over time due to factors such as clock drift, system or network load, cross traffic or configuration changes. And with the burden of proof resting on the trader that timestamps were accurate when trade data was recorded, timestamp accuracy needs to be continuously monitored and recorded to provide an audit trail. To make this process efficient, and minimise compliance overhead, it also needs to be easy to correlate recorded timing data with recorded trade data.
Provenance is key to making this happen. Provenance watermarks recorded traffic every second with additional rich data. It includes full timing data: time source, synchronization method, clock accuracy (drift), plus more than 150 other data points: hostname, location, link name, link type and many more. Provenance records are automatically embedded in recorded traffic every second, providing a continuous record which is archived alongside the recorded trade data. Provenance maintains full context, is easy to reference with standard packet tools – e.g. Wireshark – and uses an extensible format so it’s future proofed for evolving business and regulatory needs.
Come and join us at STAC in NYC on November 7th to learn more about Provenance and how it helps ensure your regulatory needs are covered. Or if you can’t make it, for more details on Provenance check out our Solutions Brief and the Presentation from the STAC Fall Summits.