PRO+ Premium Content/Information Security

The Options Clearing Corp. in Chicago runs one of the largest equity and derivatives clearinghouses in the world. Major trades don't get finalized until they have been cleared by the OCC. So the company's fundamental purpose depends on creating secure relationships between all the parties in a trade. With so much riding on the security of the OCC's IT systems, maintaining third-party risk management and strong relationships to prevent bad actors from sneaking in and stealing important financial data has become more important than ever. Mark Morrison, senior vice president and CSO at OCC, said the equity derivatives exchange has tightened up its access management policies with third parties in the past several months. "Moving forward, companies can't just come into our system remotely," Morrison said. "We set up a system so the third party has to authenticate itself every time it comes onto our network." Mark Morrison Morrison added that CISOs should request their critical third-party partners conduct an independent assessment of...