I’ve been working with consultants at JDX, plus my colleague David Ebenezer, researching the new regulatory rules on the CFTC & SEC websites (in relation to Dodd Frank), and found ourselves going around in circles when trying to find those relating to the OTC market. It was an incredibly frustrating experience, and even when we located the rules the text of each was embedded in a PDF within the Federal Register format which then took further time to analyse, before you actually got to what you were looking for!.

We decided this was a problem that needed solving and so embarked on a mission using staff from JDX Consulting (www.jdxconsulting.com) to package the rules into a simple-to-use format, and publish them on a website. Examples can be found at our new website:  http://www.regrulepak.com

The number of rules which need packaging is sizeable, so myself and David Ebenezer reviewed the full suite and then built an index of those rules (relevant to Dodd Frank) from the SEC and CFTC. As part of this exercise we then made a call as to which we thought should be ‘in scope’ or ‘out of scope’ for the packaging process.

It looks like there are just over 100 rules which we’ll package, the others, around 116 at present we will ignore for now – although we’re open to suggestion if you think we should increase those in-scope

We will also track additions and changes to the rules over the coming months and, although the SEC & CFTC believe they will complete their rule making by the end of June, I think many people are sceptical that this timeline will be met. Later this year it is expected that ESMA will also begin issuing rules of a similar nature for Europe, at which point, in conjunction with the views of our subscribers we will decide whether to also include those rules into this process too.

The final results of our efforts will be published on a site which we will then charge to access, as the effort of monitoring and packaging these rules isn’t trivial.

What do you get?

• Subscribers will nominate specific users who will be given access to a private website
• Each rule will be extracted and packaged into a PDF with index and labelling information on the front page (such as this example)
• The rule and it’s PDF will be added to a (such as this web page) from which you can download the PDF or simply read online
• You can subscribe to updates either via email, or via RSS into Google Reader
• We can also deliver the rule packages into a DropBox folder of your choice
• Alternatively we can email rule files (within the limits of the content size and any security issues with ZIP files)

Is this useful for you?

This service is based on our belief that access to the rules is key for everyone during this time of major change – are we solving a problem that you have? Have you tried yourself to access the rules and make sense of them?

Get in touch

If you are interested please get in touch by email or telephone so either David or I can explain the RegRulePak service, and figure out if this idea is useful for you.

Best wishes, David & Bill

Email: info@regrulepak.com

Bill: +44 7711 715311

David: +44 7826 381880