Having talked with people who write life-critical code, the regulation isn't really what makes it safe. Safety comes from good engineering.

The regulation just makes it much harder to bring an unsafe product to market, and makes it clearer who to blame when people die.

But don't you think the existence of regulation influences the culture?

Penalties influence the culture. As we all know, the first lesson in economics is that incentives matter.

Sometimes, the right people aren't being incentivized to do the right thing.

much harder to bring an unsafe product to market I would assume that's the point of the regulation in the first place? Nothing guarantees great software, but say requiring companies to pay for independent 3rd party testing adds significant barriers.

I don't blame anybody who thinks it's not as regulated as it should be but you might be surprised at how extensive the current requirements are. Storing ~200 million daily transactions in order to fulfill arbitrarily complex reporting specifications from SEC, FINRA, internal audit (rogue trading detection, etc.), not to mention analytics for other trading systems... Oracle/IBM/whatever enterprise big data provider gets the contract must be sending one gigantic fruit basket around Christmas time.

EDIT: Here's a little light reading for you http://finra.complinet.com/en/display/display_main.html?rbid... (or you could just take sandpaper and rub it against your brain)