Articles Posted in SIRA

The newly formed self-regulatory organization for broker-dealers will be called The Securities Industry Regulatory Authority (SIRA). This “new” organization is actually the same NASD, plus the regulatory functions of the NYSE, which it paid-off NASD members to assume. So a question to the NASD is: Why change your name?)

SIRA is scheduled to launch in the next few months. NASD’s Director Linda Shapiro, slated to head SIRA, said the organization will include more “principles-based and prudential regulation” as part of its focus. She said that NYSE Regulation and NASD will combine their rulebooks.

Shapiro said that the organization will use “proactive” regulation to help firms stay in compliance instead of waiting for them to violate regulations before enforcing the rules. “Proactive regulation” is currently used for overseeing a small group of large firms in the Consolidated Supervised Entity (CSE) Program. SIRA will take the CSE model and push it into the industry more. Use of “proactive” regulation will allow firms to understand SIRA’s expectations, which will hopefully protect investors.