The Futures Industry Association has fired the latest salvo in its campaign to head off onerous new record-keeping rules by pressing ahead with plans for an ownership and control reporting system that it claims will form a 'practical and cost-effective' alternative to that proposed by industry watchdogs.
An FIA working group, comprised of 16 firms and all the US exchanges, is actively involved in designing the new industry-wide reporting system that is expected to be submitted to the Commodity Futures trading Commission (CFTC) by the end of this month.
"We recognise and support the CFTC's need to develop a more robust trade practice and market surveillance program," says FIA president John Damgard. "The FIA OCR Working Group has devoted considerable time to developing an industry solution that we hope will meet the Commission's goal, but CFTC feedback is critical to the progress of the initiative."
Damgard last month slammed CFTC proposals to gather more account information from market participants as "premature" and overly burdensome for the industry.
The proposed CFTC rule requires "reporting entities" such as exchanges to collect ownership and control data from root data sources such as futures commission merchants and correlate the data to the trade register on a daily basis. The CFTC included 28 different data items in the proposed rulemaking to help identify a customer.
Damgard says the model under development at the FIA would use data currently available in existing systems and would also be "less costly and less time-consuming" to implement.