FINRA needed to validate massive and highly variable daily trade-reporting workloads without sacrificing speed, accuracy, or security. ASCENDING designed and implemented an AWS-based validation architecture that modernized core processing, improved elasticity, and delivered measurable performance and cost gains.
Background
FINRA oversees up to 75 billion market events each day, covering approximately 99 percent of equities and 65 percent of options traded in the United States. Since 2014, FINRA has moved much of its operations to AWS and built a cloud-based analytics foundation for interactive analysis over multi-petabyte datasets.
As part of this transformation, FINRA continued modernizing critical surveillance systems in partnership with ASCENDING, its long-term cloud engineering and data platform consulting partner.
The Challenge
FINRA's Order Audit Trail System (OATS) ingests and validates orders, quotes, and trade events submitted by broker-dealers. The platform must ensure data quality and compliance using more than 200 validation rules while supporting major market-driven demand swings.
- Process more than 50,000 secure FTP file submissions per day.
- Execute up to half a trillion record validations daily.
- Maintain near real-time validation turnaround for downstream monitoring.
- Scale elastically during volume spikes that can double or triple normal demand.
- Protect sensitive financial data under strict security and compliance expectations.
Why ASCENDING
This engagement required both deep financial-domain delivery experience and hands-on expertise with large-scale AWS data architecture. ASCENDING brought proven capability in regulated-market cloud modernization, high-throughput validation pipelines, and secure data handling.
As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with strong analytics implementation experience, ASCENDING provided the technical depth and execution discipline FINRA needed for long-term platform evolution.
The Solution
ASCENDING built a cloud-native validation workflow that combined AWS serverless processing with secure storage, queue-based orchestration, and network segmentation aligned to FINRA controls.
- Broker-dealers submitted OATS data files through secure FTP, then files were ingested into Amazon S3 with automatic server-side encryption using AWS KMS.
- A controller tier coordinated validation orchestration and distributed workloads to AWS Lambda functions using Amazon SQS input and output notifications.
- Lambda workers executed rule-based record validation at scale, while Amazon EC2 resources supported data feeds and external source integration for steady throughput.
- Logging and operational visibility were centralized through Amazon CloudWatch Logs, and deployment boundaries were enforced in Amazon VPC with separated test and production environments.
This architecture preserved near real-time validation while improving elasticity and resilience under volatile market conditions.
The Outcome
FINRA achieved stronger operational performance and better economic efficiency while preserving the control posture required for regulated financial workflows.
- Increased cost efficiency by 2x through AWS Lambda pay-as-you-go processing and retirement of on-premises server infrastructure.
- Reduced validation processing times from 3-7 minutes to under 1 minute, even under high-volume conditions.
- Improved broker-dealer feedback quality with more detailed data error reporting.
- Established a practical modernization path toward microservices-based controllers and broader cloud migration for adjacent analytics and web workloads.
