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By Robert Cook, President and CEO, and Greg Ruppert, Executive Vice President, Member Supervision, FINRA. From 2021 to 2024, the SEC brought enforcement actions against numerous FINRA member firms for recordkeeping violations involving off-channel communications (OCCs) and settled them on substantially similar terms. In January 2025, the SEC brought additional OCC-related actions against other member firms but settled these on significantly less burdensome terms. A group of firms settling before 2025 petitioned the SEC to modify their settlements to align with the January firm settlements. The SEC recently denied this petition.
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By Greg Ruppert, Executive Vice President, Member Supervision, FINRA
As a self-regulatory organization, FINRA is uniquely positioned to engage with member firms to understand their business models and provide them with timely, actionable insights and information. As part of FINRA Forward, FINRA is working to enhance how we support member firm compliance to better protect investors and safeguard markets, including strengthening the constructive feedback loop from FINRA’s regulatory programs to our member firms. Sharing information gathered through our regulatory programs can help member firms improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their compliance capabilities, understand how their compliance programs compare to other firms, and potentially avoid issues that might otherwise develop into compliance failures.
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By Robert Cook, President and CEO, FINRA. To serve its mission—promoting investor protection, market integrity, and vibrant capital markets—FINRA must continuously improve its regulatory policies and programs to make them more effective and efficient. During my time as CEO, we have worked hard to build a culture of continuous improvement across FINRA—and we have come a long way, including by restructuring departments, building new technology capabilities, improving coordination across different functions, enhancing transparency, and identifying ways to be more risk-focused.
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By Robert Cook, President and CEO, FINRA. Last month, the SEC issued an exemptive order providing significant relief from the personally identifiable information (PII) reporting requirements of CAT (the Exemptive Order). This was an important step towards reducing unnecessary PII risk associated with CAT, and was directionally consistent with a blog I previously wrote calling for CAT to stop collecting and storing investors’ PII. As discussed below, however, the Exemptive Order did not eliminate all PII from CAT.
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By Robert Cook, President and CEO, FINRA. In September 2024, the SEC approved amendments (Amendments) to FINRA’s TRACE reporting rules to reduce the current 15-minute timeframe for reporting transactions in relevant fixed income securities.
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By Robert Cook, President and CEO, FINRA. In October 2023, the SEC adopted Rule 10c-1a, which is intended to enhance transparency in the securities lending market. In effect, the rule requires market participants to report securities lending transactions to FINRA, and requires FINRA to adopt rules establishing a system to facilitate such reporting and to publicly disseminate specified reported loan information. Earlier this month, the SEC approved the required FINRA rules.
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By Robert Cook, President and CEO, FINRA. The Consolidated Audit Trail, or CAT, is an SEC-mandated reporting system that collects data regarding trading in the U.S. equities and options markets. The SEC first proposed CAT in 2010 when the limitations of pre-CAT reporting facilities were highlighted by the Flash Crash. The final CAT rule was adopted by the SEC in 2012, a more detailed plan for CAT was approved by the SEC in 2016, and reporting into CAT was implemented in phases from 2018 to 2024.
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As a not-for-profit membership organization, we are committed to transparency and engagement with our members regarding our finances. Accordingly, we want to update you on FINRA’s plans over the next several years for funding our mission of protecting investors and promoting market integrity in a manner that facilitates vibrant capital markets.
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By Greg Ruppert, Executive Vice President, Member Supervision and Jonathan Sokobin, Executive Vice President, Chief Economist and Head of the Office of Regulatory Economics and Market Analysis
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By Bill St. Louis, Executive Vice President and Head of FINRA EnforcementFINRA Enforcement works on the front lines of investor protection. This blog post discusses some of the key objectives that drive this critical work.
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