EquiLend Restores Some Services After Cybersecurity Incident

Fintech firm EquiLend said on Friday some services, including trading and post-trading solutions, had been restored, more than a week after it suffered an outage due to unauthorized access to its systems.

EquiLend, a company at the heart of securities lending on Wall Street, disclosed in late January it had identified unauthorized access to its systems and a portion of them had to be taken 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, BlackRock, J.P. Morgan and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

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.”