At last week’s GCP Next 2016, we announced that our market reconstruction prototype successfully validated, processed and linked 25 billion trade events in one hour. This is equivalent to processing an entire day’s worth of equities and options data – or up to 100 billion FIX messages – in four hours.

Market reconstruction is just the beginning
Being able to validate, process and link this amount of data could also lead to a real opportunity for every firm participating in the U.S. financial markets – leveraging this cloud-accessible financial data to support numerous business functions and analyze the financial universe.

A comprehensive, centralized copy of all financial trading information would allow firms to move some traditional operations to the cloud. The platform will not only enable them to reduce operational costs while improving time market and risk analysis, but also provide more efficient processes using an elastic platform that grows with their business.

The financial data ecosystem
Over the last 40 years, the evolution of technology in capital markets has dramatically increased data volumes and complexities. An industry data infrastructure could allow any financial institution to process trade data and build analytics applications on top of it, or cross-infrastructure analytics on top of platforms such as Google Cloud Platform. By pulling all of this together in a centralized platform, firms could then apply their own specific business case analysis, tools and applications in order to stay compliant.

Looking toward the future
This platform could lead to the creation of a commercial application that would return value back to market participants in terms of ensuring compliance, integrating key trading functions, and generating economic- and firm-level risk models. One day, these analytics may even impact your own personal financial applications installed on your smartwatch.

As cloud computing becomes more accepted in the financial services industry and a new trade forensics tool is developed, disruption and transformation will continue in the modern financial markets – to the same extent as observed in the music, broadcasting and retail industries.