U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approves Consolidated Audit Trail plan changes targeting USD 50 million to USD 70 million in annual cost savings

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved an amendment to the National Market System Plan governing the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) and granted exemptive relief from certain Exchange Act Rule 17a-1 recordkeeping requirements to enable a set of cost-saving measures intended to materially reduce CAT operating costs while maintaining core regulatory functionality. The SEC estimated the package will deliver approximately USD 50 million to USD 70 million in annual savings versus the 2025 CAT budget, including about USD 19.4 million to USD 24.1 million of incremental savings beyond those expected from cost-saving exemptive relief granted in 2025. Key changes include ending routine creation of interim lifecycle linkages unless requested by authorized regulatory users, shortening data retention by allowing deletion of CAT data older than three years (with shorter retention for specified datasets), easing late record re-processing requirements while retaining enhanced linkage processing and allowing ad hoc full replay requests, eliminating certain functionality associated with the online targeted query tool, and ending Participant reporting of rejected messages. The amendment also relaxes certain CAT processing and availability deadlines, adopts a revised approach to generating anonymized customer identifiers and retires CAIS in favor of a reference database and related mapping tools, and adds a spending cap provision for future changes that would materially increase operating expenses. SEC leadership framed the decision as part of a broader, ongoing comprehensive review of CAT costs and budget sustainability, with an expectation of continued work between the Plan Participants and industry to identify further savings.