The Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) issued guidance for reporting major systems outages at exchanges and alternative trading systems (ATS).
Following a review of the requirements on trading venues to report systems incidents, and a review of industry practices in this area, the CSA issued guidance to update the regulatory requirements and processes for reporting issues both to the CSA and the general public.
The guidance covers possible glitches in a range of systems, including those used for order entry, order routing, execution, trade reporting, data feeds and market surveillance.
Among other things, the guidance aims to clarify the regulators’ expectations about the information that should be included in a marketplace’s initial notification, follow-up notifications and postmortem reports.
“We expect an appropriate degree of transparency and timely notification of a material systems incident,” the CSA said, adding that this will allow investors, industry firms and regulators to decide how to respond when faced with a loss of service.
The guidance also stressed that generic notifications to the public about outages does not qualify as notifying regulators. Instead, exchange staff must contact CSA staff directly.