Cat videos vs FRTB?

Really interesting panel yesterday at the STAC Summit London with Andrew Matthews of HSBC, Oleg Rasskazov of JPMC, Rich Radley of Google Cloud, and Bret Kean of DMW Group.

There seemed to be a consensus that bursting to the cloud was a plausible way (perhaps the only economical way?) for banks to meet the radically larger computing requirements of the Fed's upcoming Fundamental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB) regulation. But at one point the customers on the panel started to ponder a situation in which all the major banks would burst to the cloud simultaneously at the end of the month or end of the quarter to meet reporting deadlines, and they asked whether cloud providers could handle such a coordinated surge in demand.

Rich pointed out that in the case of Google's cloud, there are much bigger users than financial grids--think YouTube and Spotify--meaning that there's a vast pool of resources outside this industry that can be called upon during demand spikes. He did suggest that this might slightly degrade the response time of cat videos on YouTube, but he seemed think that was an acceptable tradeoff for improving risk management in global capital markets.

Hmm. Maybe he's right. But those cats do the most hilarious things.