Max Bowie

Since its creation in the wake of the May 2010 “Flash Crash,” the much-maligned and costly Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) has gone from a promising must-have to an expensive, sprawling regulatory oversight function. Now it’s up for review. And there are some harsh questions being asked. Not least of them is how ownership will be maintained going forward: Currently, the CAT is operated by Finra, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which took over the proposal when the company originally

Here’s how it used to work: an exchange or vendor changes the pricing or conditions for an instrument or a segment of instruments, then sends that information to the marketplace for end-user firms to incorporate into their workflows. But if a firm failed to implement any changes properly, or it didn’t implement them fully or within the allotted timeframe, that firm could (and increasingly will) be held accountable, meaning they’ll be subject to fees and penalties.

Toward the end of 2024, Anthropic introduced the Model Context Protocol, its open-sourced standard that defines how large language models and AI agents can interface with external text and data sources. Normally in finance, protocols are slow to catch on, but just like AI development in general, the MCP has proven quite popular on Wall Street, especially among the major data providers. John Kain, head of financial services market development at Amazon Web Services, tells WatersTechnology that