“We believe this initiative will be an important innovation in the Bats regulatory program, creating a healthy forum for industry participants to share market intelligence directly with the Bats regulatory staff,” said Bats Chief Regulatory Officer and Executive Vice President Tami Schademann. “By creating a collaborative forum for the sharing of information, our customers can help to enrich our market surveillance program, leading to better surveillance and more investigations of unwanted behaviors in our market.”

The Bats Community Policing Program establishes a “Walking the Beat” process of engaging directly with the trading community to gather further information and intelligence about unwanted trading and quoting behaviors in the U.S. equities and options markets. It also initiates an open and proactive dialogue between the Bats regulatory team and a trading community that has made a substantial investment in recent years to become more sophisticated in monitoring markets.

The combination of this initiative and the Bats Client Suspension Rule is a powerful enhancement to the regulatory program at Bats. The Client Suspension Rule, approved by the SEC in February 2016, assists the company in taking swifter action to eliminate manipulative behavior, such as spoofing and layering, on the Bats Exchanges. It also accelerates the disciplinary processes by enabling Bats to stop disruptive quoting and trading behavior.