On August 22 FIF submitted a follow-up letter to the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research (the OFR) with additional questions relating to implementation of the new requirement to report to the OFR transactions in non-centrally cleared bilateral reports. FIF would like to thank the members of the OFR Repo Reporting Working Group for their contributions in the drafting of this letter.

On August 23 FIF submitted a comment letter to the SEC on the FINRA rule filing to establish the Securities Lending and Transparency Engine (SLATE) system for reporting securities loan transactions. The FIF comment letter also comments on the draft Participant Specification for SLATE published by FINRA. FIF would like to thank the members of the Securities Lending Transparency Working Group for their contributions in the drafting of this comment letter.

The Front Office Committee will have its next call on Tuesday August 27 at 11 am ET to review applicable updates and notices from the SEC, FINRA, FINRA CAT and the equity and option exchanges.

The Data & Technology Committee will have its next call on Wednesday August 28 at 10 am ET to review capacity, latency and volume data for the prior month for the equity, options, currency, crypto and futures markets. The spotlight presenter will be Olivier Cousin from Exegy, who will discuss the Exegy AMD Partnership on Tick to Trade Latency.

The next call for the OFR Repo Reporting Working Group will be on Tuesday September 3 at 11 am ET. The Working Group will continue its review of a digest of issues discussed by the group. The Working Group will also continue to discuss how to handle various open reporting issues given the lack of guidance from the OFR.

FIF has scheduled a call for Tuesday September 3 at 2 pm ET to discuss next steps in response to the March 22 FINRA Trade Reporting Notice on Upcoming Trade Reporting Enhancements for Fractional Share Transactions. FIF submitted a letter to FINRA during May 2024. FIF has invited the members of the Data and Technology Committee and the TRF/ORF Working Group to participate on this call.  

On Tuesday September 3 at 3 pm ET, Ignacio Sandoval of the Orrick law firm will continue his review of the current status of the various rule filings by the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (FICC) to implement the SEC mandates relating to centralized clearing of cash trades in Treasuries and Treasury repos. FIF has invited the members of the Back Office Committee, the Compliance and Surveillance Working Group, the Financial Risk Regulations Working Group and the TRACE / Fixed Income Working Group to participate on this call. If you would like to participate on this call and are not a...

The next CAIS Working Group call will be on Wednesday September 4 at 11 am ET. The next CAT Transaction Reporting Working Group call will be on Wednesday September 4 at 2 pm ET.

The next call for the Emerging Technologies Working Group will be on Tuesday September 10 at 10 am ET. As the spotlight topic, representatives from Lightbits will present on “AI and the Cloud: How to get Insight from Unstructured Data.”