Recent public trading anomalies and glitches demonstrate the urgent case for careful control over shared financial technology.

Corvil, a provider of a monitoring platform for financial markets, has launched a real-time general purpose risk and compliance monitoring system that addresses the growing need for better control over high-speed electronic trading systems.

Corvil has collaborated with the world’s leading exchanges and broker dealers in the development of this solution. It is available immediately via the latest release of the CorvilNet platform. Over twenty major trading institutions have already deployed the new release into their production environments.

“By providing us with critical data analytics on an automated basis, the new release of CorvilNet greatly aids the compliance and performance monitoring of NYSE Euronext’s U.S. markets,” said Bruce Lee, group chief information officer at NYSE Euronext.

The Corvil system provides for continuous compliance monitoring for new regulations aimed at safeguarding operations of electronic trading infrastructure, and delivers an authoritative data capture of all trading activity to be used in off-line analysis and reporting.

To address the specific challenges involved in modern trading infrastructure, Corvil monitors and captures all information as it is being transmitted on the network wire with zero impact on the performance of the trading systems and no changes required in existing software.

By using network wire data, the platform is able to independently observe 100% of all activity into, within and out from a customer’s firm. It can watch orders placed and aggregate fills received, including those that are unexpected and unauthorized.

“You can sleep much better at night knowing you have a completely independent watchdog system that sees everything. It’s easy to mitigate risk in the situations you’ve thought about. The scary situations are the events no one has imagined, and this helps protect us from those,” said James Doherty, managing director of equities at Credit Suisse.

Corvil continuously analyses wire data, detects trading events and also monitors system health in real time. Supervisors are made aware of anomalies, threats and faults within seconds. Corvil alerts can be fed directly to automated processes, which can enforce position limits, message-rate caps, kill switches or load balancing.

“Algorithmic-driven trading anomalies, technology glitches and operational errors must be captured, detected, analysed, alerted and acted upon within seconds as opposed to minutes, hours or at end of day,” said Sang Lee, managing partner at Aite Group. “We have seen hundreds of millions of dollars wiped off business balance sheets in a matter of minutes when a trading glitch occurs. We need new systems in place that can perform risk and compliance management functions for trading infrastructure in real-time without impacting the performance or quality of execution.”

A typical CorvilNet deployment can capture millions of trading-related messages per second, from wire taps, aggregation switches, or even software logs, and then decode, correlate, analyse and alert in real-time. Data can be stored for historical analysis and can be exported to external systems using many industry standard interfaces.

“Our goal is to make CorvilNet the de facto standard platform for performance, risk and compliance monitoring in the financial vertical,” said Corvil CEO Donal Byrne. “We understand that ensuring the operational performance and robustness of trading infrastructures is an extremely high priority for our customers. With this release, we wish to empower our customers with a powerful set of new capabilities to mitigate technology risk while providing a platform for the future that is equipped to meet the needs of upcoming regulations.”