TUCON2011: deploying Dodd-Frank with CEP

Sumit Sadana, VP Integration Middleware at Barclays Capital, and  TIBCO CEP specialist Mukesh Gehlot co-presented on the Barclays Capital implementation of a Dodd-Frank reporting system covering real-time reporting and auditing of Swap Data Repositories (SDRs). They constructed a Compliance Risk Reporting application that involved validation, compliance and reporting rules allowing correlations between trade messages (as events), and outputting tailored reports that are routed to designated audiences.

The performance / throughput and state management requirements pointed to a CEP platform approach, TIBCO BusinessEvents, whose declarative rule capabilities allowed for better rules management and the ability to add and refine rules as required.

Another “city trader” incident, $2Bn, and the need for better risk controls

I happened to be visiting a TIBCO CEP client in the banking industry last week when the UBS “trading fraud” story gained steam. Some of the smarter investment banks are using technologies like CEP to get a handle on risk management, which has been, and will always be, a significant area of interest for banks and their regulators. As far as CEP technologies go, risk management is usually concerned with trade-state management make rule-based approaches more interesting than the trade-stream approach typically used in automated trading systems (and hence the useage of TIBCO BusinessEvents rules technology in this space over the usual ESP stream processing engines).

Risk and governance are of course often seen as aspects of the problem: situation awareness and track and trace of trading events. I hear that at least one TIBCO customer for example is using CEP for Dodd-Frank reporting (also considered a TIBCO Hawk monitoring rule engine as well as TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP use case).

Trade Audit Trails: track and trace for capital markets’ regulatory compliance

tradetrackandtrace-snipOne of the other interesting meetings at the recent OMG standards event was by the Finance Domain Task Force on the requirement for a “Trade Transaction Traceability” standard to meet the regulatory requirements of Dodd-Frank (full name: Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act). The idea here is to provide an audit trail (or log), to some SEC-approved XBRL- based XML format, of all the activities and processes that are involved in a “trade” in an investment bank. Thence the need for track-and-trace across front, middle and back office systems.

From a CEP perspective, this is more of a risk management problem than the typical low-latency algo-trading application usually associated with stream-processing CEP in the financial markets. A typical solution for trade track-and-trace would combine some combination of TIBCO Hawk monitoring and TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP to correlate trade processing throughout the bank into a single audit trail while minimising footprints and impacts on existing processes and execution times. Another solution, also CEP-based, would adapt TIBCO Active Service Gateway as a “financial service router” or Services Monitor / Message Interceptor (doing discrete monitoring to create the audit trail).

The OMG is continuing to work on this proposal, and their use of trade and process event correlations (using CEP) could also provide an input to the planned OMG Event Metamodel and Profile standard. And a similar, existing CEP use case is planned as a presentation by an existing TIBCO customer at TUCON this year (in conjunction with an update on TIBCO Hawk technology for the “edge of the Event Processing Network”)…

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