Formal verification of financial algorithms

Abstract

Many deep issues plaguing today’s financial markets are symptoms of a fundamental problem: The complexity of algorithms underlying modern finance has significantly outpaced the power of traditional tools used to design and regulate them. At Aesthetic Integration, we have pioneered the use of formal verification for analysing the safety and fairness of financial algorithms. With a focus on financial infrastructure (e.g., the matching logics of exchanges and dark pools and FIX connectivity between trading systems), we describe the landscape, and illustrate our Imandra formal verification system on a number of real-world examples. We sketch many open problems and future directions along the way.