The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission a proposed rule change to establish a new issue reference data service for corporate bonds. FINRA currently requires underwriters of initial offerings for corporate bonds to submit information relating to the bonds to FINRA under Rule 6760. This information is limited to a handful of data fields generally needed to set up a bond on TRACE for trade reporting purposes. If adopted, the rule change will expand the number of fields to include a more comprehensive set of data for corporate bond new issues.

In addition, FINRA will disseminate the corporate bond new issue data to subscribers of a new FINRA data service. A subscription for the data service will cost $250 per month for subscribers that use the data internal purposes only, and $6,000 per month for subscribers that retransmit or otherwise disseminate the data to outside persons or organizations.

The proposed rule change is based, in part, on the recommendations of the SEC’s Fixed Income Market Structure Advisory Committee.

FINRA’s proposed rule change filing is available here.