Washington, DC, July 28, 2014 — SIFMA today released the following excerpts from a statement given by Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr., SIFMA president and CEO, at an equity market structure roundtable discussion with key market participants, legal experts, and Members of Congress, hosted by Rep. Scott Garrett, Chairman of the Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government-Sponsored Enterprises:

“Building on decades of leadership on market structure issues and more than 14 comment letters over the past four years, SIFMA recently convened a broad-based task force of our diverse membership to develop a series of market structure changes that we believe will enhance transparency, provide for fair and timely access to market data, and address the complexity and fragmentation caused by rebates and order types.

“SIFMA recommends that the cap on access fees should be lowered to no higher than 5 cents/100 shares. By reducing or eliminating access fees, the economic incentives to route orders away from exchanges would be reduced … and would decrease the economic incentive to route orders based on based potential rebates.

“Policymakers should also take steps to reduce the number of trading venues to which a broker dealer must connect. All broker-dealers engaged in a professional trading business are effectively required to connect to all exchanges …. However, the need to establish and maintain these multiple connections is costly and contributes to the risk of market instability.

“SIFMA believes that market pricing information from all sources … should be distributed to users at the same time.

“The current SIP construct for distributing market data is outdated and in need of short-term and longer-term reforms … Over time, the central SIP structure should be replaced with multiple processors that could be any commercial entity that meets established standards for operation. These processors would distribute public market data and compete on performance and cost to better serve the marketplace.

“Robust transparency and disclosure for both retail and institutional investors must be encouraged. Today’s markets are extremely transparent by rule and practice, but SIFMA believes market participants can do even more to help investors understand how their orders are routed and executed. Market participants should provide investors with better disclosure of relevant information in a standard, easily understood format.

“SIFMA and its members are engaged in the public debate over the health and fairness of our equity markets and have put forward specific, commonsense solutions to bring greater trust and confidence to our system. We urge Congress and the SEC to take a good hard look at our recommendations and to continue this deliberative review of our market structure.”

The full testimony can be found here.

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The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) brings together the shared interests of hundreds of securities firms, banks and asset managers. SIFMA’s mission is to support a strong financial industry, investor opportunity, capital formation, job creation and economic growth, while building trust and confidence in the financial markets. SIFMA, with offices in New York and Washington, D.C., is the U.S. regional member of the Global Financial Markets Association (GFMA). For more information, visit http://www.sifma.org.