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Technology Blog

Createathon
The ninth annual Createathon, FINRA’s premiere innovation event, took place over the course of three days in late September. Over 530 staffers participated, including 32 competing teams spanning 11 departments as well as volunteers, DeepRacer competitors, and a dance troupe, to name a few.

FINRA Latino Affinity Network Celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month
In the early hours of Sept. 16, 1810, church bells rang to signal a call to arms in Dolores, Mexico, beginning the Mexican War of Independence. By 1821, what was once called New Spain, became the nations of present-day Central America.

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Innovation and collaboration are two of FINRA’s four core values. Michael Hawman, Director of Technology for Delivery Services, returned to FINRA after participating in AWS re:Invent in 2022 with a proposal that would align these two values for FINRA’s business and technology divisions.

FINRA’s R&D Program Explores Emerging and Innovative Technologies
FINRA’s Research and Development (R&D) program is an innovation engine for FINRA - a sandbox for staff to take risks, explore new and disruptive technologies, assess potential usefulness to FINRA use cases, as well as investigate and test solutions to known problems.

Security Hackathon
The hackathon is designed to provide technology staff with foundational security knowledge as well as the opportunity to practice mitigating security risks like broken access control, cross-site scripting, security misconfigurations, injection attacks and more. The planning team works with a vendor to create three cyber ranges to practice security hacking at beginner, intermediate and advanced levels.

Award of Distinction
The Award of Distinction recognizes a select group of exceptional performers who have significantly influenced or impacted one or more of FINRA’s strategic enterprise goals or key objectives through their sustained efforts.

Createathon
Createathon, FINRA’s premiere innovation event, isn’t your average hackathon. Sure, there is a healthy dose of exploratory and rapid engineering in the name of problem solving, but this event is so much more.

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June 28 marks the 55-year anniversary of the six-day riot that took place at the Stonewall Inn, a coveted watering hole for the gay community in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City.

Juneteenth
2024 is the third year that Juneteenth is recognized and celebrated as a federal holiday honoring the official abolition of slavery in the United States of America. As history states, President Lincoln abolished slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. However, that did not immediately end slavery throughout the United States.

Technology
Ryan Broussard is no stranger to the Createathon Winners’ Circle. Since participating in his first event in 2020, his team GLAM 2.0 won third place overall and the People’s Choice Awards in 2020, team AQUA took first place in 2021, and 2022 his team IPIC won first place overall and the People’s Choice Awards. That’s quite a winning resume, However, for Ryan, it’s not all about winning. It’s also about innovation, collaboration, networking, and developing creative solutions that benefit FINRA and ultimately firms and the industry.

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FINRA’s Eighth Annual Createathon and internal hackathon premieres October 16-19 at the University of Shady Grove in Rockville. This year’s event is powered by the theme “Level Up,” reflecting the importance of continually expanding our expertise and knowledge.

Technology
Geetha Ramachandran has spent her entire career working in the technology industry, and she’s passionate about innovation and finding solutions to complex problems. At FINRA, she leads teams in building and delivering enterprise solutions with a focus on automation and development operations. In part one of the three-part series, Tech Journeys: Women in Technology & the Evolution of the Industry, Geetha gives us a snapshot of her personal technology journey and how she’s kept up with innovations.

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FINRA’s cloud journey started more than a decade ago. During this journey we learned a lot and have provided significant contributions to the cloud service.

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Hi, I’m Jon. I’d always heard that the best way to learn meaningful skills as a developer was to change jobs every four years. So, in 2012, when FINRA hired me as a junior developer, I reminded myself that this was just the first stop on my journey to build and shape a technology career.

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You’re looking for a job in technology, and you’re given a choice between FINRA and a major technology company. Which would you choose? For me, it was easy, I chose FINRA, and I’ve never looked back.

Here’s What the Pandemic Taught Me about FINRA Leadership
Read time: 2 minutes Life happens. Sometimes in the most jarring, unexpected ways that can impact your work life and your livelihood. And when it does, you want to work for a company with empathetic leadership, that has genuine concern for employees, and a culture of caring and adaptability.

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Innovation
At FINRA, we do more than just ensure the broker-dealer industry operates fairly and honestly. One of our core values is innovation.

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At FINRA, we’ve built a framework and cultivated a mindset, a culture for innovation and collaboration. It not only helps ensure the securities industry follows the rules, but also it empowers our employees with projects, programs, and opportunities so they can be the best version of themselves.

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At FINRA, we’re the first line of oversight for the brokerage industry. And our employees are the defenders along that line, ensuring every day that we protect the investing public against fraud and other violations of FINRA rules and the federal securities laws.

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September 2021 marked the sixth anniversary of FINRA’s annual Createathon event, under the theme, “Powered by People.” For three days, teams of staff collaborated across business and technology to innovate.

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When you think of the best work environment in information technology, you probably think of a place where you can do highly advanced work that makes a positive difference. Where the organization values your unique contribution and perspective, and invests in your ability to reach your potential.

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What is Herd? Overview Herd is big data governance for the cloud. The herd Unified Data Catalog (UDC) helps separate compute from storage in the cloud. Herd job orchestration manages your ETL and analytics processes while tracking all data in the catalog. Here is a quick summary of features:

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How FINRA Assesses Performance of its Machine Learning Models Data science has come a long way in the past 10 years. As machine learning projects become productionized, they look increasingly like software projects. Focus has shifted from presenting charts to integrating AI software into a production pipeline.

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I’m proud to announce that IDG's Computerworld has named FINRA No. 1 among midsize companies on its 2020 Best Places to Work in IT list. This is our ninth appearance on the annual list, but beyond being No. 1 in our category, this one is particularly special.

AI Circuit
As far back as the 1940s, an artificial intelligence (AI) technology revolution has forever been just around the corner. Today, with significant advancements in technologies like machine learning, natural language processing and computer vision, and new customer applications like virtual assistants, that revolution is in many respects here.

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During the productionization process of our machine learning patterns, we observed variations in our model predictions and probability score outputs when executed in Spark on a distributed cluster environment. This variation in model outputs occur when model type, hyperparameters, seed value and input data are held constant.

Security
FINRA held its biannual Cybersecurity Conference last month, bringing together experts from securities firms, regulators and law enforcement to share effective practices, practical tips and information about new threats and challenges.

Voices from the Buildathon
On November 8, FINRA, Deloitte and the MIT Fintech Club kicked off an innovative event aimed at leveraging fintech in service of making investors smarter and safer.

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FINRA has provided transparency to over-the-counter equities (OTCE) trading for years through its public website.

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Bitcoin is a popular cryptocurrency, which is a form of electronic cash, in which a ledger of all transactions is stored as a blockchain. In this article we will show how to compile your own local copy of the Bitcoin client, run it, and add custom commands in order to inspect various attributes of the underlying blockchain.

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UPDATE 10/19/2018: During the week of Oct. 8, 2018, exceptional market volatility again produced record numbers of electronic messages processed by FINRA, including the three highest-volume days in history:

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Do you have a complex stored procedure defined in a Postgres database in which there are countless different scenarios that need to be tested? One option is to use a specific DEV/QA Postgres instance where the stored procedure is run with different sets of input data and verify the results are as expected through queries.

13 Awesome Ideas from our Createathon
This past August, over 250 people at FINRA took two days to find data driven solutions for FINRA. With over 45 teams, there were some amazing ideas that came out of this hackathon. Below are 13 awesome ideas teams came up with.

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The Text Analysis team from Enterprise Solutions department wanted to help unlock the potential in these documents with text analysis. With AWS and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools advancing, they believed they had the tools to help.

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API tests provide quick feedback, resilience against brittleness in tests compared to UI end-end tests, and provide consistent results. The business logic implemented in the server-side as an API does not need to be tested from the UI/presentation layer.

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Apache Spark has become a popular platform for many types of big data workloads. The Spark API offers a well abstracted API that allows developers to easily solve big data problems.

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HiveQLUnit is a library of JUnit extensions for unit testing Hive scripts. In this tutorial we will explore how to create test cases for Hive scripts and then show how to implement those test cases using HiveQLUnit.

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AWS makes it easy to set up a REST service with authentication using Lambda, the AWS API Gateway, and IAM. Using these technologies through AWS doesn’t require hosting cost for the Lambda and API Gateway service and you pay per Lambda call. You also benefit from Lambda auto-scaling depending on the request volume and concurrency.

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XPP stands for eXtreme Parallel Processing. For larger systems with more complicated code, XPP helps achieve parallelism on the cluster at the lowest possible level i.e. individual queries to achieve maximum possible utilization.

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What is Gson? Gson is a Java Library widely used to convert Java Objects into their JSON representation and vice versa.

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At the end of this tutorial, you should be able to set up a generic JS project using Angular and Grunt as a task runner. The project should be able to unit test, generate test coverage report, and minify the source codes with minimal configuration. This guide can help developers who are unfamiliar with JS frameworks and tools to start learning.