for blog post
The practice of PFOF has drawn heightened scrutiny from the U.S. Congress, the SEC, state regulators and other regulatory and legislative authorities. For example, regulators have brought enforcement actions against a similarly situated broker-dealer for matters relating to its receipt of PFOF, which resulted in material fines and censures. We cannot assure you that lawmakers and regulators will not bring a similar action against us or impose restrictions on the practice of PFOF in the future, including, but not limited to, requirements to provide additional disclosure on best execution, or impose maximum payment rates and limitations on trading volume applicable to PFOF or ban the practice entirely. For example, in December 2022, the SEC proposed four separate equity market structure rules related to (i) best execution; (ii) order competition, including requiring certain retail equity orders to be exposed in auctions before being internalized; (iii) order execution disclosure; and (iv) order tick size and fee caps. Although these proposed rules related to market structure design do not outright ban PFOF, they introduce new requirements around “conflicted transactions,” and if adopted as proposed, they would have the indirect effect of making PFOF more difficult or impossible to earn and compressing the revenues we could theoretically earn. Any new or heightened PFOF regulation, including the abovementioned proposed rules if adopted as proposed, could have a material and adverse effect on our business operations and we may experience pressure and disruption to our current business operations. In addition, as a broker-dealer facilitating the trading of national market system stocks, we are subject to the disclosure obligations of Rules 605 and 606 of Regulation NMS, which were adopted in 2000 to help the public compare and evaluate execution quality at different market centers. In March 2024, Rule 605 was amended to increase the disclosure obligations of brokerages subject to Rule 605. Compliance with these amendments may require us to make additional disclosures about our execution practices, some of which could cause certain of our customers or potential customers to not use our investing platform. We may incur significant compliance costs in an effort to comply with any such laws and regulations. Because some of our competitors either do not engage in PFOF or derive a lower percentage of their revenues from PFOF than we do, any such heightened regulation or a ban of PFOF could have an outsized impact on our results of operations. Furthermore, depending on the nature of any new requirements, heightened regulation could also increase our risk of potential regulatory violations and civil litigation, which could result in fines or other penalties, as well as negative publicity.