Nasdaq OMX has launched a cloud computing platform for the financial services industry built on top of Amazon Web Services’ infrastructure.

Called FinQloud, the platform provides management and storage of financial data to help market participants streamline operations and comply with regulations. Customers are not limited to using FinQloud to manage Nasdaq OMX data, as the platform is open to data from other financial-services companies.

The fully managed cloud solution includes infrastructure data management, virtualization and hosting. Its main thrust is really to take the burden of worrying about compliance off the customers’ shoulders by giving them a cloud environment customized for regulatory compliance for financial services.

Eric Noll, executive VP of transaction services US and UK at Nasdaq, called it “a protected warehouse for regulated data.”

At initial launch, FinQloud will provide two services: Regulatory Records Retention (R3) and Self Service Reporting (SSR).

R3 is a storage and retrieval tool that helps customers meet the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s record-retention obligations. SSR gives broker-dealers ability to perform fast on-demand analys8is and reporting of the trade data they store.