Carlo DiFlorio, FINRA's Chief Risk Officer and Head of Strategy, told the annual meeting of the National Society of Compliance Professionals Monday that FINRA is emphasizing efforts to mitigate market risks, even as it regards US capital-market integrity as at its strongest historically. HFT & Algorithmic Trading DiFlorio addressed thee initiatives. First, FINRA examiners are focusing on firms' supervision of HFT and algorithmic trading, including pre-implementation testing and firm-wide "kill switch" procedures when something goes awry. Second, FINRA's Board decided ...
State or local government entities, special tax districts, hospital districts and other municipal bond issuers face a December 1 deadline to respond to the SEC Enforcement Division's "Municipalities Continuing Disclosure Cooperation Initiative." The MCDC Initiative is part of regulatory and enforcement emphasis on the municipal-securities world resulting from Dodd-Frank. Municipal issuers are supposed to make continuing-disclosure filings of events affecting their outstanding bond issues (financial statements, ratings changes, tax shortfalls, etc.) like SEC ...
The US Sixth Circuit last week narrowed its standard for adequately pleading scienter in PSLRA cases using a collective-knowledge theory to impute knowledge to a corporate defendant from among various employees. In Omnicare, the Court limited collective-knowledge scienter by imposing the helpful, but unremarkable, requirement that such a pleading demonstrate a reasonably close connection between the collectively-held-knowledge and the issuance of the misstatement (or decision not to correct a prior omission). In re Omnicare, Inc. Securities Litigation, No. 13-5597 (6th
Twenty-seven European markets are transitioning to a T + 2 settlement cycle today, October 6, 2014. Until today, those markets settled transactions three days after the transaction date; beginning today, securities settlements will occur two days after the transaction date. The move puts Europe ahead of the United States, as the US has a T + 3 settlement date for most of its securities transactions. By shortening the cycle, the European Commission seeks to standardize settlement procedures across all of the affected European markets and to shorten the time needed to observe and ...
On September 30th, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) announced a proposed rule that would implement the controversial Comprehensive Automated Risk Data System (CARDS). Under the proposed rule, FINRA seeks to implement automated data gathering from clearing firms and brokerages in a two-phase approach. The proposal seeks to take advantage of "technological advances [that] can be leveraged to obtain, store, manage and access large quantities of data to identify and quickly respond to potentially fraudulent and abusive behavior." In the first phase, "CARDS ...
On September 30, the D.C. District Court rejected two GOP state committees' challenge to the SEC's regulation prohibiting pay-to-play among investment advisors. Bowing to "curious" precedent in which words don't mean what they say and produce inconsistent results, the Court held the challenge must be filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals, not the District Court. The New York and Tennessee GOP Committees sought declaratory and injunctive relief to prevent the SEC from enforcing its four-year-old investment adviser pay-to-play prohibitions. 17 C.F.R. § 275.206(4)-5. The Court ...
Ruling in a case of first impression, the Sixth Circuit rejected an implied cause of action under Section 36(a) of the Investment Company Act of 1940, 15 U.S.C. § 80a-1 et seq. Although the Circuits remain split, recent decisions (after 2001) agree on the point. Two pension funds sued an exchange-traded fund (ETF), its investment advisor (IA) and its trust-company-affiliate (BTC), claiming BTC's Lending Agent fee "' 35% of all net revenue on the ETF's securities-lending activity - was excessive. The Court affirmed dismissal of the express Section 36(b) claim for breach of fiduciary ...
In my last blog post on interpleader actions, we explored the benefits a financial services firm can obtain from filing an interpleader action. An interpleader action protects the holder of assets (such as a bank account, brokerage account or life insurance policy proceeds) when there is a dispute between two or more parties claiming ownership. The holder, or stakeholder, can file an interpleader action to deposit the assets (the "res") into court to allow the competing claimants to litigate over the ownership of the property, allowing the stakeholder to be discharged from further ...
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority ("FINRA") recently filed a proposal with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") to amend FINRA's rule governing member firms' background investigations into associated persons applying for registration with the firm. Specifically, the proposed rule clarifies the current investigation procedures contained in FINRA Rule 3110(e) and adds a provision requiring member firms to adopt written procedures designed to verify the accuracy of the disclosures contained in an applicant's Uniform Application for Securities ...
On August 21, 2014, the United States Department of Justice announced a record 16.65 billion dollar agreement to resolve civil claims alleged against Bank of America for improperly concealing the risks of mortgage-related securities when it sold them to large institutional investors before and after the 2008 financial meltdown. Separate governmental entities announced unrelated settlements with Goldman Sachs and Standard Chartered Bank, while the Justice Department announced a 13 billion dollar settlement with JP Morgan Chase and a 7 billion dollar settlement with ...
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