About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Time-stamping Needs To Be Better Than Regulators Require, Providers Say

Subscribe to our newsletter

Although the requirement for time-stamping set by Europe’s MiFID II regulation and for the US Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) is within 100 microseconds of the recognised standard UTC time, in practice firms and exchanges will need their reporting to be accurate down to nanoseconds or just a few microseconds, according to time-stamping services providers.

“High-frequency traders and high-performance traders are transacting in substantially less than 1 microsecond. 100 microseconds is three orders of magnitude out on the level of accuracy of time-stamping,” says David Snowdon, chief technology officer of Metamako. “In a market like Nasdaq, if the response time is 80 microseconds, a trader could place an order, receive a response back, place another order and get another response back, and place a third order. On 100 microsecond timestamp accuracy all three of those could have the same time-stamp, totally legally. The 100 microsecond limit is nowhere near good enough to provide an idea of what order the events happened in the market.”

The communications protocols used for financial industry trade reporting, such as precision time protocol (PTP) and network time protocol (NTP) can achieve accuracy, and therefore time-stamping, in nanoseconds, according to Snowdon. This is achievable on transmissions between points as far apart as New York and London, he adds.

Accurate time-stamping is important to operations as well as compliance, states Heiko Gerstung, managing director at Meinberg, a German company that makes electronic clocks capable of nanosecond-level accuracy, for use in industries. “Customers want to be able to correlate stamps from different systems with each other to get information,” he says. “The easiest is measuring the time it takes from one transaction being generated to being received by another system, and then to be forwarded to the exchange.”

Meinberg’s capabilities include detection of what parts of a network are slower than others, which allows users to replace or improve parts of their network, and therefore reduce the overall latency of their solution. As Snowdon says, delays happening in fiber cables can make time synchronisation challenging. Regarding MiFID II’s 100 microsecond standard, Gerstung adds, “You have to make sure the clocks are well below 100 microseconds of divergence from UTC. If this is not the case, you are not complying with the regulation, in our opinion.”

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: The future of market data – Harnessing cloud and AI for market data distribution and consumption

25 June 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes Market data is the lifeblood of trading, but as data volumes grow and real-time demands increase, traditional approaches to distribution and consumption are being pushed to their limits. Cloud technology and AI-driven solutions are rapidly transforming how financial institutions manage, process,...

BLOG

A-Team Group Names RegTech Insight – USA 2024 Award Winners

You have all voted and the results are in – A-Team Group has announced the winners of its RegTech Insight Awards – USA 2024. The awards acknowledge leading RegTech solutions, services and consultancy to capital markets participants across the USA, and the winners were  named following the company’s 8th annual RegTech Summit in New York...

EVENT

Future of Capital Markets Tech Summit: Buy AND Build, London

Buy AND Build: The Future of Capital Markets Technology London examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...