The fintech company EquiLend announced on Friday that, more than a week after experiencing an outage brought on by unauthorized access to its systems, some services, including trading and post-trade solutions, had been restored.
The company at the center of Wall Street’s securities lending, EquiLend, said in late January that it had discovered unauthorized access to its systems and that some of them needed to be put offline.
The company’s securities lending platform, Next Generation Trading, manages more than $2.4 trillion in transactions each month, according to its website. Its client base includes nearly 200 asset owners, agency lending banks, broker-dealers and hedge funds.
EquiLend is partly owned by some of Wall Street’s biggest heavyweights, including Goldman Sachs (GS.N), BlackRock (BLK.N), J.P. Morgan (JPM.N), and Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAC.N)
The recent hack of EquiLend left market participants resorting to manually process with limited impact, a spokesperson at the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) told Reuters last week.
Clients were also at risk of missing crucial regulatory reporting obligations, said Josh Galper, managing principal at capital markets consultancy Finadium.
“If data were not available from EquiLend, then you’ve got risk managers and liquidity managers who may not know what they have, which impacts their risk ratios and capital ratios, and impacts their ability to both manage internally and to report to regulators,” Galper said.
But with services being restored, he added that “the data will get sorted out in time. The reports will get filed. They might be late.”
