The national securities exchanges and FINRA (collectively, the self-regulatory organizations, or SROs) today began distributing a cost study questionnaire to gather information to assess and manage the financial impact of anticipated Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) reporting requirements on the broker-dealer community. The SROs are obligated to submit to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) a national market system (NMS) plan to create, implement and maintain a consolidated order tracking system, or the CAT. The SROs are currently working together to identify an optimal design for the CAT and this study is a key part of that deliberative process. The SROs have requested that recipients return the completed questionnaire by August 6, 2014.
“The SEC is requiring the SROs to develop the CAT, and we are mindful that the project will impact a broad group of market participants who will need to comply with the new reporting requirements,” said Jeff Wells of BATS Global Markets on behalf of the SROs. “We think it’s important to ask for targeted industry feedback so that we may thoughtfully make the CAT as efficient and cost-effective as possible for U.S. market participants while meeting the SEC’s requirements. We hope that all firms that will eventually have reporting requirements to the CAT will provide us with their thorough, valuable insights for this survey.”
Deloitte & Touche LLP has been selected as the third party facilitator for this study, and the results will be presented to the SROs as aggregated, anonymous data. The CAT cost study seeks industry input to assess:
- baseline costs to the industry for regulatory reporting
- the costs and benefits of the creation, implementation and maintenance of CAT
Additional information, including the planned timeline for the CAT NMS Plan is available at www.catnmsplan.com.
