FINRA OATS Retirement

Effective Wednesday, September 1, 2021, FINRA OATS Rules will be deleted from the FINRA rulebook.  See Regulatory Notice 21-21 and OATS retirement notice. 

As part of the proposed rule change to delete the OATS Rules from the FINRA rulebook, FINRA made conforming changes to the rules relating to FINRA’s Alternative Display Facility (ADF), Trade Reporting Facilities (TRFs) and OTC Reporting Facility (ORF) to replace references to the OATS Rules with references to FINRA’s CAT Compliance Rules.  Specifically, for any transaction in an order for which a member has recording and reporting obligations under Rules 6830 and 6870 of FINRA’s CAT Compliance Rules, the trade report must include an order identifier assigned to the order that uniquely identifies the order for the date it was received. See, e.g., Rules 7130(d)(13), 7230A(d)(14), 7230B(d)(14) and 7330(d)(14). Firms should continue to use the OATS-related fields for purposes of reporting such order identifier.  The applicable technical specifications for the facilities will be updated accordingly.

In addition, after the retirement of OATS on September 1, 2021, firms should disregard the OATS reportable flag included as reference data in the ORF Equity Security Master and ORF Daily List API downloads.

Please contact FINRA Product Management or call (866) 899-2107 with questions regarding this notice.