3/7/2012 - Market about to get even more insane: Sub-Nanosecond Time Stamps Readied for Regulators

Source: Securities Technology Monitor

The supplier of a time service center at a Savvis market center in Weehawken, N.J., says its sub-nanosecond readouts are now compliant with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s Order Audit Trail System and is likely to be compliant with any Consolidated Audit Trail that might be specified by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Certichron, based in San Jose, Calif., said that the time stamping service that it put in place in 2011 at the Savvis NJ2 market center has been upgraded to act as a FINRA OATS Time Verification Service, reading back the time of day from a device under management and creating a record that cannot be repudiated.
“As the whole regulatory and business requirements develop over the very near term, subsecnd reporting will be absolutely key,’’ the firm’s president, Tom Kelly said.

The system, according to chief technology officer Todd S. Glassey, uses three or more records of a stamp to avoid any technical faults or malicious attempts to reset time. Attempts to reset time or forge records will fail, because the time stamps produced will be wrong, he said.

Every record that gets sent out by the service gets verified and any attempt to alter a record gets identified, Kelly said.

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