by Jim Toes
President & CEO, STA
Resources like time and money, the twin currencies of life, are finite, so every choice—whether spending a single dollar or an hour of your day—forces individuals to prioritize and weigh what truly matters against what doesn’t.
For institutions it’s about deciding where to direct budget and staff hours to maximize operational performance and innovation. On June 12, 2025 the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under its new Chairman announced plans to withdraw 14 proposed rules*, all issued between March 2022 and November 2023.
These proposals, which included rules on designing market structure, climate disclosure, and amendments to CAT, were widely criticized as misguided and overreaching. Industry stakeholders argued they were void of industry input, poorly designed, too complex, and likely to result in overly burdensome compliance costs on financial firms without clear benefits.
For the SEC, drafting, revising, and defending these rules consumed staff hours — time that could have been spent on other priorities like investor fraud schemes, an issue that plagues our industry today, or on digital assets and blockchain technology, which still require a clearer rule set.
The SEC has freed up agency resources for more targeted, practical regulatory efforts. It also has restored an environment that historically provided for meaningful engagement with the financial industry, fostering dialogue over dictation.
For firms, the proposals also demanded significant attention, diverting their legal and technology teams from core operations like improving client services or streamlining workflows. Legal teams can now focus on navigating existing regulations rather than deciphering sprawling new mandates. Technology resources, often stretched thin, can be redirected to enhancing systems that support innovation and everyday workflows — think faster transaction processing or better fraud detection. These are the kinds of expenditures that deliver immediate tangible value to clients and markets.