FINRA announced that Richard W. Berry will become its Executive Vice President and Director of Dispute Resolution beginning on December 1, 2014. Mr. Berry will replace Linda Fienberg, who will retire on November 30, 2014. See: FINRA Press Release.

SEC and FINRA issued an Investor Alert to warn investors that certain penny stocks being promoted aggressively as investment opportunities may in fact be the stocks of dormant shell companies with little to no business operations. The investor alert offers five tips to help investors avoid scams involving dormant shell companies: Research whether the company was dormant and then brought back to life. You can search for the company name or trading symbol in the SEC's EDGAR database to see when the company may have last filed periodic reports. Know where the stock trades. Most pump-and-dump

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ("OCC") revised its policy and procedures for handling Matters Requiring Attention ("MRA") that result from OCC examinations of supervised institutions. MRAs communicate specific supervisory concerns identified previously by the OCC during examinations, in writing, to boards and management teams of regulated institutions. An MRA must receive timely and effective corrective action by bank management and a follow-up by OCC examiners. The revised OCC guidance highlights changes to MRA policy and procedures that have been incorporated into the "Bank

The European Commission adopted its first "equivalence" decision for the regulatory regimes of central counterparties ("CCPs") in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore. The CCPs in these jurisdictions will be able to obtain recognition in the EU, and therefore can be used by market participants to clear standardized OTC derivatives as required by EU legislation, while remaining subject solely to the regulation and supervision of their home jurisdiction. According to the press release, the details of the rules may differ, but international regulators are pursuing the same objective: to

The U.S. Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation ("DTCC") and the CFTC agreed to dismiss the remaining claims in the DTCC's lawsuit against the CFTC for its approval of rules permitting clearinghouses to steer swap trading data to the clearinghouse's affiliated swap data repository ("SDR"). Originally, the CFTC proposed the requirement that parties to a swap be able to select the SDR to which their data would be reported. This CFTC position, which was encapsulated in one of the CFTC's series of Frequently Asked Questions, was challenged in court by the CME Group Inc. ("CME"). In order to