FINRA plays a critical role in ensuring the integrity of the financial markets through writing and enforcing rules and by examining firms for compliance with those rules. This is done to provide investors protection and to promote confidence in the US markets.  

With rapid increase in AI adoption, Model Governance becomes a challenge. Data scientists spend a significant amount of time wrangling data, getting Machine learning models into production and monitoring and troubleshooting them. By adopting actionable monitoring with automated Governance workflows, we achieve model operations resiliency having model governance compliance at scale.

We built and operationalized FINRA’s Model life cycle workflows to automatically monitor model performance, governance compliance, and operational processes. These governance workflows are orchestrated to have process controls in place, including remediation through notifications and automated alerts, regardless of the type of model or where it is deployed. This results in reliable, compliant, and scalable models. This approach has led to operational resiliency (ensuring business, risk and regulatory controls are adhered to) and full auditability of models to mitigate risk of models in production. 

During this presentation, we will cover the following topics:

• Who is FINRA?
• What is ML Model Governance?
  • Key Pillars in Governance
  • Orchestration of Governance
  • Risk Management
• Scaling and Operationalizing Model Governance Automation
  • End-to-end Model Governance
  • Governance Process Enforcement
  • Production Governance Controls
• Observability and Monitoring
  • Model Monitoring
    • Operations, Risk, Quality, and Process monitoring.
• Operational Reliability for Model Governance:
  •  Actionable and Outcome-Driven Insights, Continuous Improvement, Data-Driven Decisions,  Promoting Automation and Enhanced Resiliency

Speaker: Sumalatha Bachu

Sumalatha Bachu (Senior Director at FINRA) is an Operations Manager with over 23 years of diversified experience in Big Data Operations, Monitoring, Data Quality, and Model Operations with Governance and Analytics. She currently leads a multi-disciplinary team of professionals who run market regulation Batch/Data operations for FINRA. This includes managing petabyte-scale data and complex workloads that anchor FINRA’s Big Data architecture in the Cloud. Sumalatha has a master’s degree in Information Technology from the University of Maryland. She lives with her husband and two kids in Maryland. She is passionate, motivated, and a coach combining technical acumen to provide innovative solutions.

Speaker: Logan Kudlacik

Logan Kudlacik (Senior Data Analyst at FINRA) brings 8+ years of wide-ranging analytical experience, including the last 2 years at FINRA leading an initiative to deliver data-driven insights to improve FINRA’s overall operational posture. Logan has a bachelor’s degree in finance from Kutztown University and currently lives in New Jersey. He is passionate about technology and learning and applying new skills both at work and in his personal life.