Washington, DC, May 23, 2018 –  Today, Brett Paschke, Head of Equity Capital Markets at William Blair, testified on SIFMA’s behalf before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Securities and Investments at a hearing entitled “Legislative Proposals to Help Fuel Capital and Growth on Main Street.” The full written testimony submitted for the record can be found here.

SIFMA’s testimony outlined several recommendations for preserving the vitality of our public capital markets.  SIFMA and a broad coalition joined together recently to produce a report, “Expanding the On-Ramp: Recommendations to Help More Companies Go and Stay Public,” which detailed ideas to increase the attractiveness of public markets for issuers. SIFMA believes the report balances the need to streamline issuer obligations with a recognition that investor confidence is a critical component to the vibrancy of public capital markets.  SIFMA is pleased to see the Congressional interest in these recommendations.

SIFMA’s testimony focuses on the following recommendations:

• Lengthen the “on-ramp” for Emerging Growth Companies (EGCs) by expanding the ability of companies to take advantage of scaled reporting and confidential filing provisions.
• Expand the “Testing the Waters” provision of the JOBS Act to all issuers so that all would-be issuers are able to gauge investor interest ahead of an offering.
• Encouraging more research of EGCs and other small public companies through targeted changes to research regulations.

• Eliminate “baby-shelf” restrictions that make it very difficult for small-cap companies to timely and opportunistically raise the capital needed for expansion or research & development.
• Raising the caps on mutual fund positions in EGCs, to encourage institutional investor interest in these newly-public companies and create more robust trading of small cap stocks.

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SIFMA is the voice of the U.S. securities industry. We represent the broker-dealers, banks and asset managers whose nearly 1 million employees provide access to the capital markets, raising over $2.5 trillion for businesses and municipalities in the U.S., serving clients with over $18.5 trillion in assets and managing more than $67 trillion in assets for individual and institutional clients including mutual funds and retirement plans. 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.