US stock market company NASDAQ and cloud pioneer Amazon.com have announced a new range of cloud services designed to allow financial services companies to meet their regulatory obligations.
Aimed initially at US financial services firms, the FinQloud platform comprises two, Amazon-hosted services: Regulatory Records Retention (R3) and Self Service Reporting (SSR).
R3 "will provide broker-dealers with a storage and retrieval tool to help meet U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Rule 17a-4 record retention obligations at substantially reduced cost and complexity," while SSR allows "broker-dealers to perform fast, on-demand analysis and reporting on their stored trade data".
"To meet the stringent operational and regulatory security requirements of the financial services industry and to protect data integrity, all connections to FinQloud will be required to pass through a rigorous encryption key management system, scheduled to be available in the coming months," the companies said in a statement. "The encryption key management system will be housed in private NASDAQ OMX data centres before directly connecting to AWS."
A spokesperson for Amazon Web Services said that the FinQloud services are, for now, specifically focused on the needs of US firms.
"The initial focus of FinQloud is on the data storage needs of US-based clients – specifically their obligations under US Securities and Exchange Commission Rule 17a-4 to retain copies of books and records in Write Once Read Many (WORM) format," they said.
"Shortly after launch, additional product offerings will be made available to address other regulatory and operational needs of US-based clients."
They added, however, that "ultimately the FinQloud platform will provide global coverage."
