Case Study: FINRA (U.S. securities industry regulator) achieves 500 billion daily validation checks and doubles cost efficiency with Amazon Web Services (AWS Lambda)

FINRA Adopts AWS to Perform 500 Billion Validation Checks Daily

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) runs the Order Audit Trail System (OATS) to monitor order, quote, and trade events for NMS and OTC equities, ingesting more than 50,000 daily files and applying over 200 validation rules—up to half a trillion checks per day—with processing demand that can double or triple during market spikes. FINRA needed a highly scalable, secure, and cost-effective architecture that met strict encryption and compliance requirements while supporting a move toward real-time processing.

After evaluating Apache Ignite on EC2 and Spark on EMR, FINRA chose AWS Lambda following proofs of concept; data is ingested to Amazon S3, validated by Lambda functions, and coordinated by an EC2-based controller using SQS, RDS, VPC isolation, and CloudWatch, with the system built and tested in three months. The result: a twofold improvement in cost efficiency, sub‑one‑minute validation responses (previously 3–7 minutes), richer error feedback to broker‑dealers, and a roadmap to replace the controller with microservices and expand serverless adoption across other applications.

FINRA

Tim Griesbach

Senior Director of Technology