Role-Based Access, Audit Logging and Encryption: A Due-Diligence Checklist for Trading Technology Vendors

Every trading technology vendor says its platform is secure. The useful exercise is to ask what that means in concrete terms, and to compare the answers against what your own operations, risk and technology leads need. Role-based access, audit logging, encryption, monitoring and hardened integrations are the five areas that come up most, and each can be tested with a handful of direct questions.

This checklist is written for the person running the evaluation. It does not replace your own security review or any obligations your organisation has. It helps you see quickly whether a vendor has thought about the basics in the way you need.

Role-based access

Role-based access means people see and do only what their role requires. In trading operations that is not a nicety. The person who configures a routing rule, the person who views positions and the person who exports a report are often three different people, and the platform should let you reflect that.

• Can roles be defined to match our teams, or are we limited to a few fixed ones?
• Can access be limited by account, venue or function, not only by screen?
• How is access granted, reviewed and removed when someone changes role or leaves?
• Is there a separation between who prepares a change and who approves it?
• Can we see, on demand, a list of who currently has access to what?

Watch for answers that rely on shared logins or on the vendor's staff making manual changes. Those are signs that access control is a process, not a feature.

Audit logging

An audit log is the record of who did what and when. Its value shows up later, when someone has to explain an event to a colleague, a counterparty or a reviewer. A log that is incomplete, editable or hard to retrieve fails exactly when it is needed.

• Which actions are logged: logins, configuration changes, permission changes, data exports, order-related events?
• Does each entry identify the user, the action, the time and the object affected?
• Can logs be altered or deleted by users, administrators or the vendor?
• How long are logs retained, and can we export them to our own systems?
• Can we search and filter them without a support ticket?

Auditability should also be a theme across the product, not a single screen. Reporting, liquidity views and risk outputs should each be traceable to their inputs.

Encryption

Ask where encryption is applied and let the vendor describe it in their own words. You want to understand protection for data moving between your systems and theirs, and for data stored on their side. You do not need to become an expert in algorithms to judge whether an answer is specific or evasive.

• Is data encrypted in transit and at rest?
• How are keys and credentials managed, and who has access to them?
• Are API credentials scoped narrowly, and can they be rotated without downtime?
• What protections apply to data passed through integrations with third-party providers?

If a vendor will not describe their approach without an extended nondisclosure process, note that, and decide how much it matters for the stage you are at.

Monitoring

Monitoring is how a vendor knows something is wrong before you tell them. Ask what is monitored, how alerts are raised, who receives them and how quickly the vendor expects to respond. Ask also what the vendor monitors that affects you directly, such as feed health, integration status and unusual access patterns, and whether any of those signals are visible to your team.

On your side, the platform should give your own operations people alerts and dashboards for the things they are responsible for. Monitoring that only the vendor can see leaves you dependent on a phone call.

Hardened integrations

Most of the real exposure in a trading technology stack sits at the joins: the APIs, data pipelines and provider connections. Ask how each integration is authenticated, what permissions it holds, what is logged when it runs and what happens if a connection fails. Ask also who owns each integration after go-live, on both sides.

Operating model and boundaries

Finally, ask about the relationship itself. Is the vendor a technology provider, or does it take on activity that belongs to a licensed professional? The answer should be clear. A software vendor supplies tools and infrastructure. The licensed team using them stays responsible for its own decisions, activity and compliance. This checklist is general information and not investment, legal or compliance advice.

Also ask about support. A security posture is maintained, not delivered once. Find out how ongoing support, monitoring and improvements are handled and how changes to controls are communicated to you.

Using the checklist

Send the questions to each vendor in writing before the demo, then compare the answers side by side. Differences in specificity are often more telling than differences in features. Keep the responses with your evaluation record so the decision can be explained later.

Steel Capital describes its role-based access, audit logs, encryption, monitoring and hardened integrations on the Services page, and its risk tooling on Risk Mitigation. If you would like to put this checklist to us directly, contact us to schedule a discovery call.