BNY's Hooey Maps SEC Rule 610/611 Overhaul and the Path to 24/7 Trading

The SEC's proposed changes to Rules 610 and 611 anchor a wave of market-structure transformation that now spans tokenization, innovation exemptions and a push toward 24/7 trading, according to Ron Hooey, Director of Global Market Trading at BNY.

Hooey laid out that agenda in an interview with TabbFORUM CEO Bruce Morris, recorded at the STA Annual Market Structure Conference and published on FORUM TV. The conversation covered regulatory and technological forces reshaping capital markets across asset classes — equities, fixed income, derivatives, digital assets and currencies among them.

What did the interview actually cover?

Three threads dominated the discussion:

• SEC rule reform. The proposed amendments to Rule 610 (access to market centers, including fee-and-rebate constraints) and Rule 611 (the order-protection, or trade-through, rule) remain the central regulatory workload for trading desks. These proposals are not yet final rules; desks tracking compliance timelines should note the interview addressed them as proposals, without new dates attached.
• Tokenization and innovation exemptions. Hooey flagged both as forces changing how instruments settle and how new products reach the market without waiting for full rulebooks.
• 24/7 trading. Extended trading hours are, in Hooey's framing, on the horizon — with open questions around best execution, liquidity distribution and market fragmentation.

The interview did not attach specific volume statistics, effective dates or compliance deadlines to any of these items. That absence matters for desks planning budgets: the discussion established direction, not timelines.

How is BNY positioning itself?

Hooey said BNY is actively engaging with regulators, exchanges and industry groups to help clients navigate these shifts. The bank is, in his telling, positioning itself at the forefront of the next evolution in market structure.

That claim deserves the usual scrutiny. "Forefront" is asserted, not measured — no client counts, technology deployments or documented regulatory filings were cited in the interview summary to substantiate it. What is verifiable from the exchange itself is the scope of engagement: regulators, exchanges and industry groups, three distinct channels, plus the client-facing framing of the bank's role as navigator rather than bystander.

Why do Rules 610 and 611 matter to execution desks?

For routing and execution workflows, the two rules sit at the core of US equity market plumbing. Rule 610 governs access to market centers, fee schedules and rebate structures — any amendment ripples through venue economics and broker routing decisions. Rule 611 requires trading centers to establish policies to prevent trade-throughs of protected quotations, which constrains how aggressively smart-order routers can interact with displayed liquidity.

Hooey's point, per the interview, is that the SEC's proposals arrive simultaneously with technological pressure — tokenization and around-the-clock access — rather than sequentially. Desks therefore face layered change: rule amendments that could alter venue economics, innovation exemptions that could alter product rollout paths, and extended hours that could alter liquidity concentration and best-execution obligations.

What remains unresolved?

The interview summary lists the open questions without answering them: how best execution is defined when sessions extend around the clock, where liquidity actually resides during off-peak hours, and how fragmentation behaves as trading windows widen.

None of these has settled answers. Extended hours proposals have drawn mixed industry responses, and the interview did not report a BNY position on a specific SEC filing or a specific timeline for any venue's 24/7 offering. The risk for operations teams is cost creep — staffing, risk systems and surveillance all scale with session length — though the conversation did not quantify any of those costs.

What should desks watch next?

The concrete markers to track are the SEC's progression of the 610/611 proposals from proposed to final rule, with adoption dates and compliance deadlines attached; any formal innovation-exemption framework; and named venue commitments to specific extended-hours launch dates. Until those land, Hooey's assessment stands as an industry positioning statement from a bank that has chosen to speak publicly about all three fronts at once.

TabbFORUM, which hosted the interview, describes itself as an open community platform for capital-markets professionals; the views expressed in the piece belong to the speakers, not to TABB Group's analysts or editors, according to the site's standard disclaimer.