New guidance from securities regulators sets out expectations for exchanges and other trading venues to report systems outages.
In a new notice, the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) provided exchanges and alternative trading systems (ATSs) added guidance for reporting material incidents with their systems. The notice also details the regulators’ process for reviewing the reporting of these sorts of incidents, and their role in addressing major systems failures and security breaches.
Among other things, the guidance sets out the types of incidents that must be reported, details the expected content and timing of these reports and the expectations for a post-mortem report.
“The objective of the filing and review of a marketplace’s notification of a material systems incident is to foster fair and efficient capital markets and confidence in those markets. Consequently, we expect an appropriate degree of transparency and timely notification of a material systems incident,” the guidance said.
The regulators also stressed that timely reporting of systems incidents is important so that regulators, investors and other market players can assess the impact on the affected market, as well as the market overall, enabling them to respond to a loss of service.