[ by Melanie Gretchen ]

The MSRB has launched a new online service to help brokers and municipal securities dealers (collectively called "dealers”) easily submit, modify and track reports of system outages or other technology-related problems that affect their ability to comply with MSRB rules.  As of 10/1/12, dealers will be better equipped to provide:

• Trade reports to the MSRB Real-Time Transaction Reporting System under Rule G-14
• Current interest rates and documents for certain variable rate securities to the MSRB Short-term Obligation Rate Transparency System under Rule G-34(c)
• Information and documents about new issues to the MSRB Electronic Municipal Market Access (EMMA) system.

If a dealer system outage or other technology-related problem affects a dealer’s ability to comply with MSRB rules, dealers must provide:

• regulatory requirement to which the outage relates;
• date and time that the problem began and ended;
• date and time the problem was detected;
• description of the source (e.g., an internal system or third party vendor system) and scope of the problem (e.g., complete outage or slow transmission time);
• description of the resolution; and
• outage impact (e.g., the approximate number of data or document submissions affected).

For further details, go to [MSRB Notice 2012-49, 9/27/12] or call Justin Pica, Director of Product Management - Market Transparency at (703) 797-6716.