What compliance costs independent dealers, and against which denominators. No regulator collects this, neither Form 1 asks a dealer what compliance costs it, so these figures exist nowhere else.
Median across reporting firms, carried forward from each firm's most recent annual answer.
All-in: staff time, technology, external consultants, audit and legal.
Includes compliance technology, so the two overlap.
Schedule 12 sets the required coverage; the premium is the cost of carrying it.
The panel-auditor pool is small and shrinking, this is what that concentration costs.
Total annual compliance spend
All-in cost: compensation for staff time spent on compliance functions including full-time, part-time and contract; compliance technology; and external consultants, audit and legal.
Compliance spend per account
Total compliance spend divided by open client accounts. Regulatory work scales with accounts and clients rather than with asset values, a KYC refresh, a TCR statement and a trade review are the same effort whether the account holds $40,000 or $4 million. This is the proportionality measure that reflects what the work actually is.
Compliance headcount
Full-time, part-time, and split-role staff whose title includes specific compliance monitoring or tasks. Operations staffing is derived as the remainder.
Revenue, for the cost-to-revenue ratio ID E-21 · MFD D-13 · DC D-25
Total revenue from the monthly financial report. Reported as a bracket, never an exact figure.
Spend answers are brackets, so every ratio here is built from bracket midpoints. Report medians rather than means, a mean is dominated by whatever midpoint the open-ended top bracket is assigned.
The annual spend figures are carried forward: a firm's most recent answer is divided by the current month's rep, staff and account counts. Ratios therefore move month to month even when spend has not changed.
No breakdown is shown for a peer group of fewer than five firms, or for an answer given by fewer than four. Suppressed answers mean the percentages shown will not total 100.