The Challenge
The financial trading industry requires highly accurate, reliable, and documentable clock synchronization for business logic, competitive advantage, and regulatory compliance. Without reliable clock synchronization, trading records can only be identified by timestamps that are off by seconds or more.
The Challenge
The financial trading industry requires highly accurate, reliable, and documentable clock synchronization for business logic, competitive advantage, and regulatory compliance. Without reliable clock synchronization, trading records can only be identified by timestamps that are off by seconds or more.
Regulatory Requirements
MiFID II, FINRA, CAT NSM, SEC Rule 613, ESMA and MiFIR regulations in Europe and the US are similar to emerging regulations around the world and call for:
- Clock traceability (to UTC, NIST, or other national atomic clock standards)
- Reliable time sync
- Transaction timestamping accuracy performance in applications
- Time sync data analytics and auditable records for proof-of-compliance reporting over multiple years
Business Logic Requirements
Firms participating in any type of electronic asset trading must use high quality clock sync management infrastructure to be able to guarantee data integrity for internal controls/compliance, data mining, and performance monitoring.
Trading venues move so fast that without highly accurate clock synchronization, the order of events cannot be determined even from trading records. Clock synchronization is necessary to monitor network performance and SLAs from networking providers, trading venues, and other trading counterparties.
Competitive Advantage
Automated trading systems require highly accurate data to find exploitable correlations. Financial trading firms seeking competitive advantage from their trading data benefit enormously from accurate timestamps.
Without reliably accurate network clock synchronization, it is impossible to measure, monitor and improve trading latency efficiency.
The Cost of Non Compliance
FINRA audits financial institutions and fines them for being non compliant (inaccurate timestamp) or failing to report compliance on the accuracy performance of order event timestamps against NIST traceability.
Over $30M in FINRA fines were issued from 2000 to 2018 to financial institutions for inaccurate timestamp issues, such as
- “the timestamp for the related subsequent report occurred prior to the receipt of the order“
- “failed to report the accurate time of execution”
- “the timestamp for the related subsequent report occurred prior to the timestamp for the combined order-route report”
- “cancelled timestamp that was in excess”
- “failed to timestamp”
“TABB Group estimates that if a broker’s electronic trading platform is 5 milliseconds behind the competition, it could lose at least 1% of its flow; that’s $4 million in revenues per millisecond. Up to 10 milliseconds of latency could result in a 10% drop in revenues. From there it gets worse. If a broker is 100 milliseconds slower than the fastest broker, it may as well shut down its FIX engine and become a floor broker.”
The Solution
TimeKeeper® is the leading enterprise-class clock sync platform solution for the financial trading industry. TimeKeeper’s innovative products can reliably synchronize time-critical application servers and virtual machines in data centers to within sub-µs accuracy and provide traceability to official time sources such as UTC and NIST.
Other use cases
Data Center
Secure enterprise clock sync for timestamping critical data center applications in real time
The Challenge
Time-sensitive data center applications must be accurately and reliably time-synced for data integrity, data governance, network latency monitoring, precise data timestamping, deterministic network performance, log file diagnostics, high-resolution data analytics, and cybersecurity forensics, and more.
- Distributed databases need clock synchronization to enable fast data synchronization methods.
- Software defined networking and network function virtualization (NFV) work better from a unified time base.
- Virtual machine performance and connectivity requires clock synchronization for monitoring and performance tuning.
- Modern data centers as well as both hybrid and pure cloud computing are difficult or impossible to run efficiently without precise time.
Cybersecurity
Secure enterprise/DoD cybertiming™ for timestamping critical cybersecurity data logs & applications in real time
The Challenge
Time-sensitive cybersecurity applications, such as real-time cyberattack, with massive concurrent bots of cyber kill chain, cyberhunt, cybersensor, cyberthreat DPM (detection, prevention & mitigation), and cyber analytics, must be accurately and reliably time-synced and timestamped for data integrity and governance.
Precise data logs timestamping, and real-time analytics of time-series and IP cyberattack geo-location and time-of-event data, including prescription and prediction, log file diagnostics, and precision cyber forensics, to name a few.
Clock synchronization itself presents attack surfaces. TimeKeeper’s unique monitoring and security alerting capabilities provide a basis for secure cybertiming™ and the use of synchronized clocks in securing computing platforms.
Cloud Database
Secure enterprise clock sync for timestamping critical distributed cloud database applications in real time
The Challenge
Distributed databases, from Cassandra to Oracle, to other distributed systems, depend on synchronized clocks to maintain consistency, to measure performance, and to discover bottlenecks. Systems distributed over the cloud or in hybrid environments face additional challenges because of the nature of virtual machines.
The unique flexibility and adaptability of TimeKeeper makes it easy to cope with the constraints and requirements of these environments. TimeKeeper’s high quality analytics, real-time monitoring, record keeping, and pane-of-glass visualization simplifies the task of building out and maintaining clock sync distribution in these environments.
5G IoT
Secure enterprise clock sync for timestamping critical 5G IoT applications in real time
The Challenge
Time-critical 5G IoT applications, such as driverless cars and industrial sensors, must be accurately and reliably time-synced for data integrity, data governance, network latency monitoring, precise data timestamping, deterministic network performance, log file diagnostics, high-resolution data analytics, and cybersecurity forensics, to name a few.
Accurate time sync of distributed applications is achieved when the network clock sync chain is traceable to UTC, the ultimate stratum 1 master clock reference, through a variety of time sources, such as GNSS, CDMA, and other sources.
Broadcast
Secure enterprise clock sync for timing critical broadcast video applications in real time
The Challenge
Time-series, interactive sports analytics tools, and cloud-based mobile TV, must be accurately and reliably time-synced for data integrity, data governance, network latency monitoring, precise data timestamping, deterministic network performance, log file diagnostics, and real-time big data analytics, as well as for meeting the SMPTE 2059 PTP timing standard for supporting SMPTE ST2110 media systems.
Accurate time sync of distributed applications is achieved when the enterprise clock sync chain is traceable to UTC, the ultimate stratum 1 master clock reference, through a variety of time sources, such as GNSS, CDMA, and other sources.
Automation
Secure enterprise clock sync for timestamping critical automation applications in real time
The Challenge
High-speed automation applications, such as industrial robotics and IoT sensors, must be accurately and reliably time-synced for data integrity, data governance, network latency monitoring, precise data timestamping, time-series data and data timeline, deterministic network performance, log file diagnostics, and high-resolution big data analytics, to name a few.
Accurate time sync of distributed applications is achieved when the network clock sync chain is traceable to UTC, the ultimate stratum 1 master clock reference, through a variety of time sources, such as GNSS, CDMA, and other sources.
Gaming
Secure enterprise clock sync for timing game applications in real time for fair gaming
The Challenge
What is fair gaming in a digital world with hundreds of millions of gamers? It is when you win or lose a game with the same accurate time base on a global scale – thus the need for fair time-sensitive game applications.
This is accomplished when applications are accurately and reliably time-synced in each data center of the global gaming network. Accurate time sync of distributed applications is achieved when the network clock sync chain is traceable to UTC, the ultimate stratum 1 master clock reference, through a variety of time sources, such as GNSS, CDMA, and other sources.