UK FCA hires Sopra Steria’s platform in £24M deal

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the independent regulatory body that regulates the financial services industry in the UK has signed a six-year deal with European information technology consultancy firm Sopra Steria to develop a new digital regulatory market data processing platform.

Following a competitive tender process, Sopra Steria grabbed a £24 million deal to deliver its Regulatory Support Service solution that should stand out as a more effective system to ensure data analysis and compliance of firms’ trading reporting activity than the current FCA’s framework.

The new platform will mix key components such as infrastructure services, cyber security, cloud and data transfer management capabilities, using open source application components, allowing the regulatory body to meet stringent validation times and reduce implementation and running costs.

This serves the FCA’s need to encompass new requirements under the new EU’s Markets in Financial Instruments Directive’, MiFID II, being able to deal with massive amounts of data as both sell-side and buy-side are required to submit market data regularly, with expected storage of billions of transaction reports over the six-year term of the deal.

In regard to the announcement, Georgina Philippou, COO at FCA said: “Having reliable, robust and scalable market data processing solutions is critical to our role in regulating capital markets. Following a rigorous selection process, we have chosen Sopra Steria to help us meet our rapidly changing requirements in this area, and we very much look forward to working with them.”

On the side of Sopra Steria was UK Chief Executive John Torrie: “This strategic big data solution will not only offer a ground-breaking service to a key client of Sopra Steria, but also the potential to reduce the cost of financial regulation in both the UK and
around Europe.”