Remarks by Saima Ahmed, Executive Vice President and General Counsel at SIFMA, as prepared for delivery at SIFMA’s C&L 2025 Annual Seminar. 

Good morning. Welcome to our 55^th annual SIFMA Compliance & Legal Seminar. I’m Saima Ahmed, General Counsel of SIFMA.

I hope you are all as excited to be here in Austin as I am. Not only is this SIFMA’s first conference here but also my first time in Austin. As I quickly learned since joining SIFMA 2 ½ years ago, it seems the number one factor that we are judged on at our conferences is the weather! With last night’s downpour behind us, now it should be perfect!

The second most important factor might be the content of our conferences. As you’ve heard from Scott and Andrew, we have an outstanding program planned for you. This is a pivotal time for our industry, and specifically for compliance and legal professionals. The last several years were marked by a very prolific rulemaking agenda. Thankfully, in many cases, in part due to advocacy efforts from groups like SIFMA with strong member support, many major rules that could have been very problematic were modified or did not move forward.

Today, we are 2 months into a new administration and we have or are awaiting new heads of key regulatory agencies. What will it all mean? It means uncertainty, but it also means opportunities as we work to advocate for the best policies for our industry. We expect, based on public statements, that the new Administration will take a far different posture toward regulation, enforcement and rulemaking – particularly out of the SEC.

It seems that the new Administration plans to pause much if not all of the pending rulemaking, which includes approximately 20 pending SEC rules alone. We also understand the SEC is considering longer comment periods on proposed rules, which we consider prudent and necessary. We’ll hear about that over the next few days.

Along those lines, I’d also like to note the welcome news that the SEC exempted the reporting of investors’ personally identifiable information (PII) to the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT). For over a decade, SIFMA has expressed strong concerns on behalf of the industry and investors that the information in the CAT—the largest database of retail and institutional trading ever created—was a ripe target for cyber criminals and that collecting PII put investors’ data at risk. We have repeatedly called on the SEC to prohibit the collection of investors’ personal information and have proposed alternatives that preserve the Commission’s ability to police the market without the need to collect sensitive personal data. The recent decision by the Commission is welcome and long overdue.

Looking ahead, we will be keeping an eye on emerging areas like Artificial Intelligence and digital assets. We also look forward to working with the SEC and FINRA to find ways to improve the efficiency of compliance with various existing rules, including the books and records requirements. In the aftermath of the SEC’s off-channel communications record fine actions, we hope to finally address the mysteries of the meaning of “business as such” and whether the compliance standard for firms really is perfection, or rather, reasonableness.

The original drafters could not have anticipated that firms would save every email, text, chat, and message sent to or from every one of their associated persons. That clearly was not the original intent of the rules and yet, here we are. We look forward to opportunities for some positive changes in this area.

Before we move to the program, I would like to take a moment to thank Scott and Andrew for their leadership. It has been a privilege and a lot of fun working with them planning this conference.

I also want to thank the many regulators who are taking time out of their very busy schedules to speak to us; we greatly appreciate the engagement. Also a big thank you to the consulting firms and law firms who are not only with us this week, but who we at SIFMA have the pleasure of collaborating with daily on legal and compliance issues that you will hear about on this stage and in breakout sessions. We are proud of the good work that we do together. And of course, many thanks to all of our moderators, speakers, and attendees—we have almost 2000 attendees this year!

And with that, it is my privilege to introduce our first session and to welcome to the stage SIFMA President and CEO Ken Bentsen for a one-on-one conversation with Acting SEC Chair Mark Uyeda.

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