Project Sentinel, a collaborative initiative by a group of banks to mutualise the cost of MiFID II implementation in the OTC front office, has created a normalised regulatory data model designed to help firms meet their MiFID II OTC sales and trading requirements. 

This data model is the first piece of a larger puzzle to create a standardised approach for ensuring regulatory conformance for front office OTC sales and trading activities.

Solving the MiFID II challenge requires a significant amount of human resources to keep pace with, understand and document the changing landscape, alongside a significant technology investment that, if solved on an institution by institution basis, will demand substantial investment by each individual bank in areas that provide limited or no competitive advantage. The aim of Project Sentinel is to enable market participants to pool resources with their peer group in such non-competitive regulatory areas, by investing in a standards-based, strategic MiFID II compliant technology solution that streamlines and automates the MiFID II business processes for the front-office, brings value and efficiency back to the business and reduces commercial risk.

The focus of Project Sentinel is on collaboration to reduce costs and risks through the mutualisation of analysis, interpretation and implementation, and reducing the cost of compliance due to sharing of costs of IT investment. 

The next phase of Project Sentinel is mapping out the MiFID II compliant workflows for the core permutations of interaction types/client types/trading models/venue types/instruments across the trading lifecycle to allow the selection of best-of-breed technology solutions (buy or build) for the new market structure to come.

Sassan Danesh (pictured), Managing Partner, Etrading Software, says: “We are delighted to facilitate this important initiative on behalf of market participants to create a modern, low-cost, standards-based MiFID II infrastructure capable of servicing client needs efficiently and electronically.”

Etrading Software has been engaged as PMO to facilitate the collaboration amongst the Project Sentinel group of banks.