Manisha Kimmel to Conclude Tenure as Senior Policy Advisor to the Chair on the Consolidated Audit Trail

Washington, D.C.–(Newsfile Corp. – January 26, 2021) – The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that Manisha Kimmel will conclude her tenure as Senior Policy Advisor, Regulatory Reporting, at the end of this month.

Since joining the SEC in January 2019, Ms. Kimmel has coordinated the SEC’s oversight of the creation and implementation of the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) by the self-regulatory organizations (SROs). As the primary interface with internal and external stakeholders, Ms. Kimmel has been responsible for assessing CAT development progress, shepherding CAT-related exemptive orders and Commission rulemaking through the agency, and establishing internal governance structures to support cross-divisional coordination and decision-making.

“Manisha’s leadership has been essential in moving CAT towards effectiveness as a tool for market oversight,” said SEC Acting Chair Allison Herren Lee. “My colleagues and I are deeply grateful for her expertise, diligence, and public service.”

“It has been a privilege to serve alongside my talented colleagues across the Commission in our oversight role of the SRO implementation of CAT,” said Ms. Kimmel. “It is extremely rewarding to see the progress made to date. CAT is now an operational regulatory reporting system.”

Through effective oversight and engagement with stakeholders, Ms. Kimmel helped guide CAT from concept to reality. Key Commission accomplishments during her tenure include:

• Enhancements to transparency and financial accountability for CAT’s implementation by amending the CAT NMS Plan to require the publication of an implementation plan and quarterly progress reports. In addition, the amendments include financial accountability provisions that establish deadlines for four implementation milestones and reduce the amount of fee recovery available if those critical deadlines are missed.
• Approval of an exemptive order relieving the SROs from collecting and retaining the most sensitive retail customer information in the CAT.
• Proposed amendments to the CAT NMS plan to accomplish a number of data security enhancing goals that provide greater oversight, consistency and transparency regarding the appropriate use of CAT data while reducing the amount of sensitive PII data collected by the CAT.
• Approval of operational-focused exemptive orders with a phased timeline for broker-dealer CAT reporting. The SROs and the industry have achieved key milestones outlined in this timeline, including the start of equities reporting on June 22, 2020, and the start of options reporting on July 20, 2020.

Before joining the SEC, Ms. Kimmel worked for Refinitiv, where she served as Head of Regulatory and Compliance, Wealth Management. In addition to her role at Refinitiv, Ms. Kimmel served on the Advisory Committee for CAT NMS LLC, a diverse group of industry experts that offers advice to SROs on technical specifications, reporting functionality, and other matters relating to the CAT. She has previously been a member of the SEC’s Equity Market Structure Advisory Committee (EMSAC). Prior to her time at Refinitiv, Ms. Kimmel served as Managing Director of the Financial Information Forum, where she worked with broker-dealers, exchanges, and vendors on issues involving regulatory and market data technology issues. She has also held positions at Jordan & Jordan and Automatic Data Processing.

Ms. Kimmel earned her B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and her B.S. in Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.