Regulatory reporting for a US broker-dealer means delivering a complete, linked record of order and account events to the Consolidated Audit Trail and CAIS on a daily clock, correcting rejections inside the repair window, and being able to reproduce any submitted event on request. The hard part is rarely the file format — it is keeping the source data consistent across the OMS, clearing files, and account records that feed it.
These guides cover what each regime asks for, what changes when the SROs publish new interpretations, and how firms move from spreadsheet-and-deadline reporting to an automated pipeline with reconciliation built in.
4 in-depth guides covering the rules, the systems, and the trade-offs.
The platform components built for the workflows in this topic.
The Consolidated Audit Trail is the SEC-mandated record of the full lifecycle of every order in NMS securities and listed options. Broker-dealers submit order events daily, linked across routes and executions, so regulators can reconstruct market activity end to end.
CAT captures order events. CAIS captures the customer and account information those events attach to — identifiers, entity data, and the relationships between them. Both feed the same regulatory picture, and inconsistencies between them surface as errors.
The submission and reconciliation steps can be. What still needs people is exception handling: deciding why a rejection happened, whether the source record or the report is wrong, and correcting it inside the window. Automation should shrink the exception queue, not hide it.
Reference-data drift rather than file formatting: identifiers that changed upstream, account records that do not match what CAIS holds, timestamps captured at different points in the order path, and linkage keys generated by systems that do not share a source of truth. Reporting from the events themselves, rather than from a reconstructed extract, removes most of that class.
CAT feedback arrives on a daily cycle and corrections are expected inside the published repair window, which in practice means exceptions have to be triaged the day they appear. Firms that batch repairs weekly tend to discover the same root cause has already produced several days of rejections.
