The FIF Rule 606 Working Group will meet on Thursday February 24 at 10am ET to review a draft comment letter on the recent filing by the SEC with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that estimates the annual costs to the industry for Rule 606 compliance. In connection with this comment letter, FIF has sent a survey request to members of the Rule 606 Working Group relating to the volume of Rule 606(b)(3) requests that firms have received. The Working Group also will discuss the FINRA proposal to require Rule 606-type reporting for routes in OTC equities.

FIF has scheduled an additional CAIS Working Group call for Monday February 28 at 11am ET to complete the Working Group’s review of the updated versions of the CAT CAIS Industry Member Reporting Scenarios published by FINRA CAT on January 28, 2021 and February 4, 2022. This will be in addition to the regularly-scheduled Wednesday and Friday CAIS calls next week.

On Tuesday March 1 at 11am ET, Ignacio Sandoval and Kyle Whitehead of the Morgan Lewis law firm will continue their review of the SEC’s recently-proposed amendments to Regulations ATS and Regulation SCI. The amendments propose to apply Regulation ATS and Regulation SCI to ATSs that trade Treasury and agency securities and repos on those securities. The amendments also propose to expand the ATS definition to include RFQ and other trading systems. The invite for this presentation has been sent to the members of the FIF ATS, Compliance and TRACE/Fixed Income Working Groups and the FIF Front...

On Monday March 7, 2022 at 4pm ET, FIF will host a webinar on Current Developments in Trading Technology. The webinar will include discussion of the following topics: converting voice communications to structured electronic data; 24-hour trading; trends in working from home and returning to the office; outsourced trading; risk data and analytics; inter-operability; and machine learning. Please register here to join us for this webinar. 

On Thursday March 10, 2022 at 3pm ET, FIF will host a spotlight presentation on Chief Compliance Officer liability. Patrick Campbell of the Baker Hostetler law firm, Adam Felsenthal, General Counsel of Great Point Partners, and Scott Gluck of the Duane Morris law firm will discuss a report by the Compliance Committee of the New York City Bar Association that details concerns about compliance officer liability and calls on regulators to provide limitations and guidance on when a compliance officer should be charged. They will also discuss the “no under influence over chief compliance...

FIF Back Office Committee. The FIF Back Office Committee reviewed applicable FICC, DTC, NSCC, SEC, MSRB, OCC, IRS and FINRA updates during the past month. The spotlight presenter for the meeting was Patrick Barthel of DTCC, who discussed DTC’s new automated process for submitting instructions for voluntary corporate actions in ISO 20022 format. Please find the committee agenda here.  FIF Rule 606 Working Group. The Rule 606 Working Group reviewed a draft interchange report to facilitate options look-through reporting. The Working Group discussed the reporting of material aspects in...

BNP Paribas Securities Services, a global custodian offering a full end-to-end solution for Regulatory Initial Margin (IM) with IM Calculation, Exposure Management and IM Segregation in Triparty, has added IHS Markit as an initial margin calculation source to its existing service for clients that are in-scope for uncleared margin rules in derivatives markets. The expanded collaboration complements the valuations services that IHS Markit has provided BNP Paribas Securities Services since 2012. Leveraging advanced analytics, proprietary data and expert analysts, IHS Markit...

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced the launch of DTCC Treasury Kinetics, a new service that provides access to critical U.S. treasury transaction data, increasing transparency into the repurchase agreement (repo) market. Leveraging data from the Government Securities Division of DTCC’s subsidiary, Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (FICC), this new service provides a daily summary of aggregated and anonymized trade activity including number of trades, volumes, dollar amounts and rates for delivery vs. payment (DVP) repo. On average, FICC matches, nets and...

JPMorgan said it has become the first lender to arrive in the metaverse, having opened a lounge in Decentraland, a virtual world based on blockchain technology. As well as the unveiling of the Onyx lounge (the name refers to the bank’s suite of permissioned Ethereum-based ervices), JPMorgan also released a paper exploring how businesses can find opportunities in the metaverse. "There is a lot of client interest to learn more about the metaverse,” Christine Moy, JPMorgan’s head of crypto and the metaverse, said. “We put together our white paper to help clients cut through the...