How does a federal agency with 4,500 employees oversee $82 trillion in annual securities trading, 21 national securities exchanges, and nearly 26,000 registered market participants? According to Securities and Exchange Commission Chief Information Officer Pamela C. Dyson, the SEC does it by multiplying the impact of every employee and leveraging technology.
Ms. Dyson was invited to be a keynote speaker at the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C., where she shared insights on how the SEC utilizes innovation in the public sector. Like any public or private sector organization, the SEC is confronted with fundamental shifts in technology that present new challenges and opportunities, noted Dyson. She added that capital markets are growing in size and complexity while the velocity of data continues to increase.
So how does the SEC stay ahead?
Ms. Dyson credited the top talent at the SEC, including more than 20 quantitative analysis teams dedicated to extracting valuable insights from data in a way that’s efficient and effective. She discussed how technology such as the cloud-based content delivery network, implemented in 2012, improved the SEC’s website speed and performance while reducing the footprint of the data center. She also described how the SEC’s Market Information Data Analytics System (MIDAS), built in 2013, leverages the scalability of the cloud to ingest and process data from all national securities exchanges in near real-time. And in May 2018, the SEC launched the Data Science Workstations (DSW) to empower the agency’s data analysts with cutting edge tools for data analysis and machine learning, according to Ms. Dyson.
New technological developments will continue to bring new challenges, but the SEC’s dedicated teams are prepared to apply innovative ideas in order to serve investors.
