Sopra Steria Extends Cloud Contract with UK’s Financial Conduct Authority

From early 2019, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) says it is planning to offer more Cloud-based services with Big Data capabilities services,  provided from Sopra Steria’s UK and India locations.  Salesforce and Oracle platforms will also be maintained by Sopra Steria for the FCA. The partnership with Sopra Steria has already yielded the release in 2017 of the FCA’s Market Data Processor which allowed financial firms to register and submit trade reporting data, including transaction reports, instrument reference data, transparency reports, double volume cap reports and commodity derivative position reports. The MDP was to designed help cope with the influx of data into the FCA following the enforcement of MiFID II, the EU directive which came into force in 2017 with requirements for far more detailed transaction reporting. It was described in a Sopra Steria press release as: “The most industry-critical regulatory cloud platform ever built in the UK.” “The Market Data Processor was a highly custom solution,” said Craig Wilson, managing director, financial services at Sopra Steria.  “It processes roughly 30 million transactions per day and handles confidential information and multiple data points. Given this volume, this had to be a bespoke solution for the FCA.” A key feature of the MDP is its ability to scale its processing capability up and down, because initially trade data is processed based on estimated positions rather than final valuations, Wilson said.  “ The platform is therefore designed in a flexible way, allowing the estimation to go up, while reference data is gathered,” Wilson said. “The platform hosts and controls all of this.”. Sopra Steria was responsible for the testing as well as the development of the MDP, which was in a test environment for six months before going live. “As with any client, we defined the pre-testing and post-testing requirements ahead of time, as well as the schedules that go with that,” said Wilson. The partnership also yielded a test environment for financial firms to test their preparedness to join the MDP system.