On April 29, 2025 Turnkey published “NFA Submits Stricter AP Supervision Rules to CFTC: Time to Prepare Is Now”.  On May 1, 2025 this interpretive notice was shockingly withdrawn.  Turnkey has not been able to officially confirm the reason NFA withdrew the notice. NFA had been privately asking industry participants for feedback for close to two years before it’s publication. A notice of this type has not been withdrawn by NFA in recent memory. Due to the rarity of a published notice being pulled back, the industry has been abuzz with rumors about what might have happened. The most common theory has been that current CFTC leadership may not have found agreement with NFA’s suggestions. On that basis CFTC staff may have encouraged the self-regulatory organization to withdraw and reconsider the notice. Regardless of why the notice was killed, for the time being it appears that Interpretive Notice 9083 is dead. So where does that leave the industry?

What did the Notice Cover

To know where we are going, we have to know where we started. On April 29, 2025, Turnkey shared that NFA expected member firms to proactively evaluate and fortify their supervisory frameworks, particularly concerning hiring, communications monitoring, order handling, trading activity, and training. It was our view that the notice was produced in response to the complexities of supervising remote work. NFA set an expectation within the notice that firms find ways to develop robust written policies, perform regular reviews, and utilize technological solutions to monitor increasingly diverse communication channels across company technology networks. Turnkey underscored the need for the industry at large to adopt a proactive “attitude change” to meet these evolving regulatory expectations. While many of the elements within the notice were not new per se, NFA’s views were certainly stricter and more applied a much more stringent approach to compliance than existing rules and interpretive notices had.

What does this mean now?

As noted above it is exceptionally rare for NFA to publish an interpretive notice and to then subsequently withdraw it. Turnkey cannot recall a time in our history as a business where this has happened for perspective. That leaves the industry in somewhat uncharted territory.

On the one hand a withdrawn notice would seem to indicate that the views included are not in fact those of the CFTC. This may mean then that what NFA had set as future expectations no longer applies.

On the other hand (and from a practical point of view from what we’ve seen at Turnkey) NFA did publish its views on expectations for how member firms might operate moving forward. Although the notice was withdrawn, it does remain published on NFA’s website as of the date of this article. Turnkey has observed NFA examiners applying the concepts from the notice in examinations for nearly the past eighteen months. It is our view that NFA intends to apply the expectations within the notice whether or not the CFTC approves of 9083 or not. While we cannot confirm NFA’s views here, we can observe the behavior of NFA auditors during routine examinations. From our position in the industry it does appear that NFA is still holding member firms to a higher standard than they once had in the areas covered by the notice.

Conclusion

Turnkey has continued to advise its customers that Notice 9083 (whether officially “published” or not) does in fact represent NFA leadership’s views on how the topics covered should be addressed. Whether or not the CFTC agrees with NFA on these views in some practical respects is irrelevant. In practice, NFA has always enjoyed a relatively wide range of latitude with regard to how it sees best to enforce its membership rules and other industry regulations.  There is a common saying which we often use at Turnkey that you may have heard. The saying is: “You can’t fight City Hall.” In this case, appropriate or not, published or unpublished, Notice 9083 does in fact represent the views of City Hall (NFA). Member firms should continue considering what NFA published under notice 9083.  So far, at least in Turnkey’s experience, it appears NFA exam teams will continue asking registrants to meet these standards.