MEET THE SPEAKER: TAYLOR DAVIES – CONTINUOUS COMPLIANCE IN PRECISION TIMING: WHAT HAPPENS BETWEEN SPOT CHECKS

Speaker Name: Taylor Davies

What's one thing you hope attendees take away from your session?

Timing isn’t just a compliance checkbox. A spot check tells you that a system met its target at one moment; it doesn’t tell you what happened in the days and weeks between checks. Continuous visibility helps you spot problems sooner, understand their impact and trust the records you rely on later. For fintechs, that means reducing real operational risk and gaining confidence in the data they use to make decisions.

In one sentence, what do you do and what is your role?

I’m the CTO at Edge Networks, where I help take the “dark art” out of precision timing by translating complex technical requirements into systems customers can operate with confidence.

What's the biggest challenge facing the industry in this area?

The biggest challenge is closing the gap between passing a test and knowing what happened in production. An accurate clock is only the starting point: time still has to reach the systems creating the timestamps. If a source drifts, a network path changes or a system fails over, firms need to know when it happened, how long it lasted and what was affected. Without that visibility, a successful spot check can leave some important questions unanswered.

What's one piece of advice you'd give to someone working in fintech today?

Pick an important event in your business and ask how confidently you could reconstruct it six months from now. Could you show which systems recorded it, whether their clocks agreed and whether anything changed in the timing infrastructure that day? You don’t need to be a timing specialist to ask those questions. They’re a practical way to find out how much confidence you can place in the evidence your business depends on.

What book, podcast, newsletter, or resource would you recommend to our audience?

I’d recommend the original The Italian Job. It’s hardly a precision timing training film, but watching a city descend into chaos when its traffic-control system is disrupted is a fun reminder that the order and coordination of events matter. In financial services the consequences are less cinematic (usually fewer Mini Coopers) but being unable to establish what happened, and when, can cause very real problems.

What topic will you be speaking about at FinTech Connect 2026?

I’ll be speaking about continuous compliance in precision timing: why periodic spot checks tell only part of the story, and how ongoing measurement helps financial firms understand what happens between them. I’ll look at how that visibility supports compliance, reduces operational risk and gives firms greater confidence in the timestamps they use every day.

Just for fun: if you could have dinner with any person, past or present, who would it be and why?

Gordon Ramsay. I’d let him choose the restaurant, then watch him try to have a relaxing dinner without inspecting the kitchen or sending something back. I’d probably learn more from his reaction to the meal than from the menu.

What industry trend are you watching most closely?

I’m watching the shift from checking whether a central clock is healthy to measuring the quality of time delivered across an entire system. The useful question is increasingly, “Can we see what each critical system experienced, and can we explain any change afterwards?” Making that information available to operations, risk and compliance teams could change timing from something investigated only when it breaks into something firms actively use to improve resilience.

Why is this topic particularly important right now?

Fintechs and trading firms increasingly depend on timestamps to understand what happened across complex, fast-moving systems. For high frequency traders, even very small differences can matter when reconstructing the order of events. A scheduled check shows that a timing system met its target at one point, but it may not reveal drift or an unexpected failover between checks. Continuous visibility helps teams catch issues sooner, understand which records may be affected and demonstrate how their systems performed over time. For firms with specific regulatory timing obligations, that evidence also supports a more defensible approach to compliance.

What's one prediction you have for the next 3-5 years?

I think firms will increasingly expect a history of timing performance, rather than a collection of successful spot checks. They’ll want to know when a source changed, how far systems moved from their reference, what was affected and how quickly performance recovered. That evidence will become part of how critical financial systems are operated and firms that have it will be better placed to investigate incidents and trust their data.