On January 11, FIF hosted a call to review a digest of rules recently adopted or proposed by the SEC and FINRA. FIF has scheduled a call for Thursday February 1 at 3 pm ET to continue this review. The January 11 call focused on rulemaking relating to Technology, Operations and Finance; and Equities. The February 1 call will focus on rulemaking in the following areas, time permitting: Options; Fixed Income; Security-Based Swaps; Multiple Asset Classes; and Compliance and Proceedings. FIF has invited the members of the Compliance and Surveillance Working Group and the SEC FINRA Regulations Working Group to participate on this call. If you would like to participate on this call and are not a member of either Working Group, please update your FIF profile or contact fifinfo@fif.com.

FIF will be scheduling a call for the TRACE Working Group to review and discuss the first draft of an FIF comment letter on (i) the January 11 rule filing by FINRA to reduce to one minute the TRACE reporting timeframe for securities that are currently subject to a fifteen-minute reporting timeframe and (ii) the parallel rule filing by the MSRB on January 12. FIF will send the invite to Working Group members later this week; the invite will include the date and time for the call.

On January 19 the SEC published for comment the amended market data governance plan submitted by the SROs (the exchanges and FINRA) on October 23, 2023. The amendment includes a process for selecting a new plan administrator. Comments are due 30 days after publication in the Federal Register. As described in the SEC notice: “The SROs propose that the Plan would become operative after the steps set forth in Exhibit F of the proposed Plan are completed. Generally, the SROs believe there are six workstreams associated with the implementation of the Plan: (1) Setting up the Plan’s governance; (2) Developing Plan fees, policies, and data subscriber agreements; (3) Selecting the new Administrator; (4) Contract negotiations with the new Administrator; (5) Administrator setup; and (6) Retirement of the CTA Plan, CQ Plan, and UTP Plan.” FIF will be scheduling time on an upcoming FIF call to review the SEC notice.

FIF is pleased to welcome Valstro to the FIF Community.