What the Broker-Dealer Industry Looks Like Now, in 5 Charts

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority released Monday its 2022 Industry Snapshot, the annual statistical report on the brokerage firms, registered representatives and market activity that FINRA oversees. "The securities industry is highly dynamic, and as it evolves, we continue to add new data sets to the FINRA Industry Snapshot to provide visibility into those changes," said FINRA Chief Economist and Senior Vice President Jonathan Sokobin in a statement. Brian Rubin, partner with Eversheds Sutherland in Washington, added in a Monday email to ThinkAdvisor that the snapshot "shows the continuing trend of representatives leaving broker-dealers and firms leaving FINRA, as well as the number and percentage of IA firms and IA reps increasing. Anecdotally, this trend may be occurring because people are trying to escape from FINRA's highly regulated rules-based environment." In 2021, FINRA began adding data about activity in Treasury securities and corporate financing filings to the Snapshot. This year, the Snapshot includes the following new additions:

• Number and size of SPAC filings;
• Customer margin debt;
• Consolidated Audit Trail, or CAT event reporting;
• American Depository Receipt activity;
• Excess net capital by firm size;
• Regulation National Market System (Reg NMS) stock trading by product type; and
• Geographic distribution of registered individuals.

The Snapshot is now part of the FINRA Data page, a new area on FINRA.org that gives users access to all of the data offerings from FINRA. See the gallery above for five charts from FINRA on what the BD industry looks like now.