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The American Securities Association is suing the Securities and Exchange Commission and has filed to stop the collection of investors' personal identifiable information through the Consolidated Audit Trail, or CAT.
Ron Kruszewski, ASA's chairman and CEO of Stifel Financial, said in a statement that while the association supports the SEC's implementation of CAT, it "firmly believes that the collection of investors' PII into a centralized database is an unnecessary and substantial risk to the privacy of American investors."
CAT is a regulatory reporting tool commissioned by the SEC and being developed by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
"There can be no reasonable cost benefit analysis which supports risking investors' privacy, especially when this data is currently available today on a when-needed basis," Kruszewski explained.
The lawsuit, he added, "is not about market surveillance, but instead about protecting the privacy of American investors."
