One FINRA: Strengthening Oversight Through a Unified Regulatory Operations Program

By Greg Ruppert, Chief Regulatory Operations Officer

The past few years have brought meaningful change to how FINRA approaches regulatory oversight. This summer, we completed a major milestone: the consolidation of FINRA’s member supervision, market oversight, and enforcement functions into a unified Regulatory Operations department. This consolidation began at the end of 2025, building on years of deliberate work to continuously improve how we serve investors, markets, and member firms.

While we will continue our efforts, this is a good time to provide an update on the new structure, its goals, and its purpose, including helping guide members in interacting with our new groups and approach. This integration is designed to optimize FINRA’s operations, improve our organizational efficiency, and strengthen our capabilities. The goal: to enhance protections for investors and markets with a more coordinated, transparent, and effective regulatory program.

Unifying Key Oversight Functions

Driven by our commitment to investors, markets, and our members, the unique attributes of a self-regulatory organization have enabled us to evolve quickly to better execute our mission in a rapidly changing industry. That demands greater strategic focus, faster execution, and sharper resource discipline. As part of that evolution, we have been deliberate and thoughtful during the past year in redesigning our core regulatory organization to better support our mission and make our oversight more effective and efficient. We have consolidated critical regulatory oversight functions to reduce complexity, empowered leaner teams to drive higher-impact work, and enabled closer integration of our business processes and technology. These changes will help support our work to more effectively address emerging risks, better deploy expertise in new market developments, and accelerate the flow of intelligence across our entire regulatory program.

These changes will also improve the efficiency of our core operations and reduce undue burden on the regulatory resources of both FINRA and our member firms. They position us to be nimble, focused, and resolute in addressing the most critical risks facing investors and markets—today and in the years ahead.

New Structure

Regulatory Operations now includes five core oversight functions:

• Risk and Intelligence, which leverages the close connectivity to our member firms that flows from our self-regulatory model to identify, assess, and proactively address potential risks to member firms, investors, and the wider marketplace as well as to share that intelligence with the broader organization.
• Examinations, which serves as our front line for assessing and promoting compliance with FINRA rules and federal securities laws through regular, risk-based inspections.
• Surveillance, which analyzes market data, tips, complaints, and referrals, processing billions of market events daily and running hundreds of proprietary threat scenarios to detect potential violations of exchange rules, FINRA rules, and other federal securities laws.
• Investigations, which conducts targeted inquiries into potential violations of FINRA rules and federal securities laws.
• Enforcement, which evaluates potential violations of FINRA rules and federal securities laws and, where appropriate, brings disciplinary actions against member firms and associated individuals to maintain investor confidence in the markets.

We have also integrated the critical support services that these teams share, so they now serve all of these functions rather than any single one, improving efficiency and effectiveness and eliminating duplication of efforts.

The new structure is also intended to further address some member firms’ past experiences in receiving duplicative or uncoordinated oversight or requests from different examiners, investigators, surveillance analysts, or enforcement specialists.

While reorganization around these five functions is a critical component in improving our oversight and intelligence functions, there is more to be done. We are evolving our business processes and technology platforms to support this integrated approach, including harnessing the power of GenAI capabilities. This multi-year effort will strengthen our regulatory operations and allow the benefits of the transformation to be fully realized.

The recommendations regarding our enforcement function set forth in a July Report from two outside experts, Professor Paul R. Eckert of William & Mary Law School and former SEC Commissioner Troy A. Paredes of Paredes Strategies, will be an important part of this effort. We have already implemented several key enhancements to improve the enforcement function and will draw on the Report to further strengthen it. By creating a framework for better coordination across the teams, the new Regulatory Operations structure has positioned us well to address many of the Report’s recommendations. 

Stronger Regulatory Oversight

One key objective of this integration is to strengthen the execution of our core function: regulatory oversight. Bringing our teams together and integrating our work allows us to see a fuller picture of a firm and of the markets—and act on it sooner.

For example, we have combined investigative teams that previously sat in different parts of the organization into a single function, so a matter is no longer handed off and restarted as it moves between groups. We have also brought our data and analytical resources together, so the same intelligence informs surveillance, examinations, investigations, and enforcement alike. And our centralized risk and intelligence function brings together several intelligence capabilities and key operational functions to provide a more comprehensive view across all regulatory teams.

That shared view changes what we can do with what we find. An exam finding, a regulatory tip, a surveillance alert, or an enforcement matter can be emblematic of a broader trend in the market. When our teams share information and draw the connections, we can identify a trend, get ahead of it, and help other members get ahead of it too. Integrated oversight allows us to intervene earlier, resolve issues faster, alert other regulators, and share information sooner with members to address risks and avert harm to investors and markets.

Our efforts to provide consistent, predictable engagement with FINRA—whether related to risk monitoring, exams, or a formal action—also result in more effective oversight of member firms. As a self-regulatory organization, our connection with our members allows us to better address risks to investors and markets. Clear expectations, reduced duplication, and consistent points of contact make for a better connection, which leads to increased information sharing. This makes our oversight stronger. 

Better Tools and Information for Member Firms

Another important component of strengthening our oversight is giving member firms the tools and information they need to empower their own compliance efforts. For example, our annual Regulatory Oversight Report gives members a roadmap of the issues we are seeing across our entire program, so they can measure their own controls against the full range of risks we monitor. We are also giving member firms more data about their own activity, including how they stack up against their peers, so they can identify and fix problems earlier.

For example, we recently expanded our Rapid Remediation program, which uses surveillance tools to identify potential reporting and compliance issues and quickly alert members so they can correct them before they become larger problems. By helping members address issues early through informal outreach rather than lengthy regulatory reviews, the program improves the quality of market data, strengthens compliance, and allows FINRA to focus its oversight resources on higher-risk activities and investor protection concerns.

Another tool we recently created is our Threat Intelligence Products (TIPs), which proactively arm members with actionable intelligence to protect investors. Our Cyber & Operational Resilience program detects vendor-related vulnerabilities and emerging cyberattack patterns—and quickly delivers targeted notifications to member firms that have reported using that vendor. And our Financial Intelligence Fusion Center is a secure portal where member firms can receive and report timely, actionable cybersecurity and fraud threat intelligence to further protect themselves and the investors they serve. We recently offered access to our Financial Crimes and Cybersecurity Conference to our member firms free of charge, to provide broader access to information about emerging risks and effective practices to manage them.  

Greater Efficiency—for Firms and for FINRA

In addition to these improvements to our oversight, the integration of Regulatory Operations functions positions us to capture even greater efficiencies across our oversight activities for both FINRA and our member firms. By making better use of information already available to us, we have reduced duplication internally and reduced the demands required of our member firms for effective oversight.

For example, we have established an internal centralized library of firms’ Written Supervisory Procedures on a pilot basis to help minimize additional requests for information that members have already provided. These efficiencies are not only about reducing unnecessary burdens on firms, but they also give us additional capacity to address risks to investors, markets, and member firms. For example, our policy-driven trade blotter requests to members are down by 64%, 8210 requests are down by 30%, and total external data requests are down by 12% in 2025 as compared to 2024. Bluesheet requests are down by 70% since 2022.  

By improving internal coordination and making better use of existing information, we can focus our resources where they matter most, thus enhancing our oversight and improving regulatory outcomes.

One FINRA

While we still have more work to do, we have made significant progress. Our formation of a unified regulatory operations program will accelerate our work to provide more effective oversight, improve our regulatory outcomes, and identify and address issues before they can harm investors, markets, and members.

The speed at which markets, technologies, and risks continue to evolve demands that FINRA evolve with them. The clearer processes, earlier engagement, and more consistent communication we have established will help us continue strengthening our oversight and delivering on our mission of protecting investors and safeguarding market integrity. By reimagining not only how our functions are organized, but also how our intelligence, expertise, and technology work together, we are laying the foundation for the next generation of regulatory oversight.