Vela’s Statement on Coronavirus - May 4, 2020

Posted 04th May 2020

In response to the ongoing global coronavirus pandemic, we are providing regular updates on the steps Vela has taken to ensure the safety of all of our staff and customers, which is our number one priority, and to ensure the continuous operation of our business without any interruption or risk to the critical functions that our clients rely on.

Since early March, in the interest of protecting all Vela employees and customers and ensuring the continued orderly functioning of our business, we have implemented the following precautionary steps:

We have introduced a mandatory work from home policy for all employees and prohibited all employee and visitor access to Vela offices until further notice.
We have introduced a ban on all business travel until further notice.
We have provided all employees with information on best practices while working from home and run an internal cybersecurity awareness campaign to counter any increase in phishing or fraudulent emails during this time.
We continue to emphasize the importance of all employees following government advice on social distancing and isolation as well as general advice on how they can help prevent the spread of infection

As a business that supports the capital markets community, we are fully enabled for remote working, something which has been offered to employees for many years and regularly tested at scale. Earlier in March we completed a full infrastructure review and conducted a Business Continuity Planning (BCP)/Work from Home test across all Vela offices in New York, Chicago, London, Belfast and Manila ahead of mandating that all employees work from home for the foreseeable future.

As we continue to work remotely, we have set up additional check-ins across our virtual teams to ensure increased levels of engagement and communication, while also providing guidance on best practices when working from home to maintain high levels of interaction and collaboration.

Global market volumes remain above average with on-going spikes in volatility. We would like to assure all clients that Vela’s platforms continue to operate at optimum levels and we are constantly monitoring data rates and capacity across our infrastructure to ensure we continue to maintain sufficient headroom against observed and forecast data peaks.

During the initial weeks of remote working we introduced an enhanced change control policy to minimize the number of changes to our business critical, production platforms. As volatility levels have adjusted to a new normal and our teams continue to work effectively and efficiently while remote, we have since reverted to our standard change control procedures.

Vela continues to closely monitor the situation globally and have initiated internal discussions on our ‘return to work’ plan in preparation for any change in guidance within the different countries we operate. We continue to follow the guidance from government and authorities within each region with the health and safety of our employees and clients being the priority. Given the efficiency and effectiveness with which we are working remotely, we will not take any actions until we are confident a change in working conditions can be done safely and without introducing risk to our employees.

We will continue to provide regular updates, where necessary, and if you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact your Account Manager.

Vela’s Statement on Coronavirus - May 4, 2020

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