In order to meet regulatory and corporate compliance requirements reporting members will require a cost effective solution that may be installed at one side of the data transfer without being tied to any proprietary protocol.

Considerations include:

- is it designed for use in most enterprise environments?

- is it flexible & adaptable to suit an unlimited range of needs for secure file transfer internally and externally?

Functionality and benefits should include:

+ can easily be adapted

+ Automatic transfer to single or multiple destinations of any file.

+ Monitor an 'inbox' directory for a file, or wait for a triggering event.

+ Take a copy of the file and generate a checksum.

+ All actions audited

+ Alerts raised for specified conditions including email

+ Option to retrieve a response file after a successful upload

+ Date and timestamp added to avoid duplicate names

+ Pre and post processing available for transfers

+ solution runs as a service

+ All files archived with a date & time stamp.

Transferring data to the FSA using System to System Interface

The Financial Service Authority (FSA) is in the process of implementing the interfaces for Transaction Reporting System (TRS) Product Sales Data (PSD) and Securities Trades Reporting (Markets) XML documents using the System to System Interface.

The FSA has not recommended any specific tools for this transfer, but has provided links to web resources which can be used to identify appropriate SFTP client tools and recommends that additional automation is used.

The current choice of tools for SFTP transfers is very large, but generally these are designed for interactive use, and provide little in the way of automated operations or audit trail for the client.

To address this need reporting members will require automation and auditing for SFTP clients.

Any solution should provide an easily configured service, which will transfer files using SFTP to predefined destinations. It also has the ability to collect response files, with configurable names and time intervals. With a combination of trusted open source tools and a flexible, configurable controlling service it should be ready for the FSA launch and adaptable for future requirements.

Solutions that have been designed to meet these and other requirements, and have sample configurations provided for both the FSA and Council for Mortgage Lending (CML) reporting environments. It is designed to be easily configured for future systems from these and other regulators (such as NYSE & NASDAQ) as well as corporate requirements (for secure file transfer internally and with business partners) and compliance with HIPAA, SOX, Privacy and Data Protection laws.