Thesys loses US stock exchange contract to Finra
Stock exchanges in the US intend to fire the contractor Thesys Technologies hired to build a data warehouse for all stock-market activity.
“Irreconcilable differences”
According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), this is the latest sign of trouble for a project designed to detect trading fraud and causes behind wild swings in prices.
People familiar with the matter told the WSJ that the exchanges have lost confidence in Thesys and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra) is expected to get the deal.
A Thesys spokesperson tells the WSJ that the parting is mutual and due to “irreconcilable differences”.
As FinTech Futures reported in January 2017, Thesys, a trading technologies and analytics software specialist, won the contract to build a new system for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to track and store all stock and options orders and transactions.
The idea was to create a consolidated audit trail (CAT) solution – a single data warehouse to record and store the end-to-end lifecycle of orders passing through US trading venues.
It was expected to be mostly operational by 2018.
It took over six years for the project to reach that stage in 2017. It was embroiled in red-tape and industry participants haggling over everything, from costs to data security requirements, customers etc.
The RFP was issued in 2013 – and 30 companies responded, including Google, IBM and SunGard (now FIS), it was understood.
