One of the more vexing rules to emerge from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in recent months regards recordkeeping demands that might call to mind the old game show “Beat the Clock.” When asked, swap dealers will have just 72 hours to turn over every single record and communication related to a specific trade or series of trades.
Banks say they will struggle to meet that deadline in what is known as the CFTC’s trade reconstruction rule because of the fragmented character of both in-house technology and the data itself. “You have slow legacy systems and you have your records scattered across systems,” Harald Collet, global business manager for Bloomberg Vault, says. “You just don’t have enough time to go manually pull it together.”
