Consult: Independent Assessment
A structured diagnostic
of your trading stack.
Systematic assessment of trading systems, risk infrastructure, data quality, and regulatory posture. Deliverable-led, a scored gap analysis, prioritised remediation plan, and (if needed) a scoped implementation spec.
At a glance
Why an independent diagnostic
Self-assessment, audited and scored against the rubric.
The FCA's own observations on operational resilience capture the recurring failure mode: firms reporting few vulnerabilities, with insufficient evidence to show they have actually been looked for. Cosmetic compliance is the default outcome of pure self-assessment.
An Independent Assessment is the inverse, a structured, evidenced, rubric-scored diagnostic of the trading stack, conducted by a senior team with no platform to sell into the findings. Designed to surface what self-attestation misses, before a supervisor does.
REGULATOR VIEW
When firms report few or no outstanding vulnerabilities, and there is a lack of information or evidence on mapping, testing, and vulnerability management in their self-assessments, it makes it difficult to check whether they've identified vulnerabilities properly.
– FCA · Operational Resilience Insights, One Year On (May 2024)
What it looks like
Scoping, discovery, scoring, report.
A typical Independent Assessment runs four to eight weeks. It starts with a scoping exercise, which systems, which desks, which regimes, that produces a signed terms-of-reference and an interview schedule.
Discovery follows: senior interviews across trading, middle office, technology, risk, and compliance; artefact review of architecture documents, policies, and sample data; and direct observation of workflow where that matters.
The output is a scored report, each dimension of the stack rated against a defined rubric, and a prioritised remediation backlog. If the firm decides to act, the backlog lifts straight into an implementation programme.
- 01 Scoping & terms of referenceSystems, desks, regimes in scope. Signed ToR, interview schedule.
- 02 Senior interviewsTrading, middle office, technology, risk, compliance.
- 03 Artefact reviewArchitecture, policies, sample data, vendor contracts.
- 04 Direct observationWorkflow, hand-offs, exception handling, where it matters.
- 05 Scoring against rubricEach dimension rated 1–5; findings evidenced.
- 06 Remediation backlogRanked by severity and regime exposure. Structured for direct adoption into a follow-on programme.
Four axes of the stack.
An assessment covers four dimensions of the trading operation, each scored against a defined rubric and evidenced with specific findings.
Trading-system architecture
OMS, EMS, and strategy execution layer, integration quality, latency profile, venue connectivity, and fit against desk strategy. The infrastructure traders actually touch, reviewed by people who have built it.
OMS · EMS · STRATEGY
Risk & pricing stack
Real-time risk, pricing engines, PnL attribution, and the plumbing between them. Where stale data, reconciliation gaps, and model hand-offs create operational exposure.
RISK · PRICING · PNL
Data lineage & quality
Market data, reference data, and internal data products, provenance, timeliness, completeness, and consistency across downstream consumers. Degraded data quality is a root cause that presents as operational, risk, and regulatory failures across the stack.
LINEAGE · QUALITY · CONSISTENCY
Regulatory posture
Exposure across MiFIR, MAR, DORA, and the relevant home and host regimes. Where cosmetic compliance masks live gaps, and where over-engineering burns budget that should go to remediation.
MIFIR · MAR · DORA
The deliverable
A document the board can read.
The output is a structured written report, scored, evidenced, prioritised. Designed to land on a CEO's desk and survive scrutiny from a non-executive director, an internal-audit partner, or a regulator.
Format is deliberate: every finding cites the artefacts that evidence it; every score points to the rubric that produced it; every remediation item carries an owner, a sequencing dependency, and an effort indication. The firm owns the document outright, there is no annual renewal and no platform dependency embedded in the findings.
Trading Stack Diagnostic, [Client name withheld]
Why independent matters
Senior assessment, independent of vendor and audit incentive.
An independent assessment is only independent if the party delivering it has no stake in what it finds.
Platform vendors discovering gaps that need their platform; big-four shops discovering gaps that need a multi-year engagement; auditors discovering gaps that validate last year's opinion, each carries a pull.
Ediphy Consult has no platform to sell into the findings (the Ediphy platform sells on its own merits), no multi-year engagement model to protect, and no auditor's reputational exposure to manage. We deliver what we see, score it against a public rubric, and hand over a remediation plan the firm owns outright.
| Ediphy Consult | Platform vendor | Big-four | Auditor | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Independent of seller incentive | – | Partial | – | |
| No multi-year lock-in | – | – | ||
| No defence of prior opinion | – | |||
| Senior practitioners | Partial | Partial | – | |
| Plan owned outright | – | Partial |