SEC Approves Amendment to NMS Plan to Further Reduce the Costs of the Consolidated Audit Trail

The Securities and Exchange Commission today approved an amendment to the National Market System Plan governing the Consolidated Audit Trail ("CAT") and provided exemptive relief from certain requirements of Rule 17a-1 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to allow for the implementation of various cost savings measures designed to meaningfully reduce the costs of the CAT while maintaining core regulatory functionality.

"After a decade of increasing costs, today's amendment builds on last year's progress towards a more efficient and cost-effective CAT. It is a step in the right direction, but there are still many more steps to be taken," said SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins. "The Commission's ongoing comprehensive review of the CAT will consider the sustainability of the CAT's budget, and we expect the Plan Participants that operate the CAT and the industry to work together towards further cost savings."

"The Division supports efforts by the CAT NMS Plan Participants to control the sizeable costs of operating the CAT. We expect these efforts to continue and look forward to additional progress," said Jamie Selway, Director of the SEC's Division of Trading and Markets.

The amendment approved today expands on cost savings measures approved by the Commission in 2025, and will allow the Plan Participants to, among other things: (1) cease creating interim lifecycle linkages absent request by an authorized regulatory user; (2) delete certain CAT data, including all CAT data older than three years; (3) ease requirements related to the re-processing of late records; (4) cease providing certain functionality associated with the online targeted query tool; (5) cease reporting of rejected messages received by Plan Participants; (6) relax certain processing deadlines for CAT data; (7) implement a revised approach for the generation of anonymized customer identifiers; and (8) implement a spending cap provision governing future changes to the CAT.

The Commission estimates that today's amendment will result in approximately $50 million to $70 million in annual cost savings as compared to the 2025 CAT budget, and approximately $19.4 to $24.1 million in incremental additional cost savings as compared to estimated savings with the implementation of cost savings exemptive relief granted by the Commission in 2025.