Regulatory compliance requires financial institutions to ensure the “completeness and accuracy of records”. Financial services firms face a complex web of global regulations governing the capture, retention, and supervision of communications. SEC Rule 17a‐4 and FINRA Rule 4511 require written records to be retained for three years, while CIRO (IIROC Rule 3803) extends this to seven. CFTC Regulations require one‐year retention, including audio, while MiFID II mandates a five‐year minimum for all electronic communications.
Regulators will not tolerate unexplainable gaps or omissions in communications data, which can lead to follow-up questions and inferred risk, particularly around off-channel communications monitoring.
Core Reconciliation Objectives
To support these standards, firms must focus on two monitoring goals:
- Continuous monitoring of record volumes from all sources to allow for quick reaction when data volumes appear off.
- Continuous monitoring of integration health to ensure quick response when connections break.
A common pitfall is the failure to realize an integration is broken and not capturing data. Legacy systems struggle to provide the level of visibility and tools needed to identify these issues and remediate any gaps.
Multiple Approaches to Reconciliation with Theta Lake
Theta Lake provides tools and services to help meet reconciliation objectives, spanning from simple monitoring to expert-level, message-by-message validation.
Theta Lake’s Reconciliation Dashboard and Reports Provide:
- Record counts by integration, proving every processed message
- Anomaly detection highlighting if ingestion volume is less than expected
- An audit trail that can be maintained with scheduled or on-demand reporting
External Monitoring and custom alerting with the Theta Lake API
- Pull record counts into your own observability tools (like Grafana or Prometheus) for custom anomaly detection and alerting
- Get counts by platform and time period
Theta Lake Message-Level Reconciliation for Deep Validation via API
- For the highest level of assurance, Theta Lake supports complete capture validation down to the message
- Returns individual IDs and platform information
- Theta Lake can provide guidance to help firms implement
Integration Resilience
The Theta Lake platform is engineered to handle common failures and ensure data completeness for regulatory compliance. Our integrations are specifically built to withstand disruptions from third-party services and reliably reconcile any missed data once those services are restored. We take ownership of maintaining these integrations, responding to functional changes, and updating them as necessary. This capability is vital for continuous monitoring and underscores the platform’s ability to ensure data completeness, even when faced with third-party service failures.
Visit the Theta Lake website to learn more about our reconciliation capabilities and platform features designed to mitigate regulatory risk and simplify compliance.
