On April 19, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved a final rule revising CFTC Regulation 160.5. The amended rule implements the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act’s (FAST Act) December 2015 statutory amendment to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB Act) by providing an exception to the requirement that certain futures commission merchants, retail foreign exchange dealers, commodity trading advisors, commodity pool operators, introducing brokers, major swap participants and swap dealers (each, a “covered person”) to provide annual privacy notices to their respective customers. (The obligation to provide an initial privacy notice is unchanged).

As amended, the rule provides that a covered person is not required to provide an annual privacy notice if the covered person: 1) provides nonpublic personal information to nonaffiliated third parties only in accordance with the provisions of the relevant provisions of Part 160 of the CFTC’s rules and any other exceptions adopted by the Commission pursuant to section 504(b) of the GLB Act; and 2) has not changed its policies and practices with regard to disclosing nonpublic personal information from the policies and practices that were disclosed to the customer under in the most recent privacy notice sent to the customer pursuant to Part 160.

CFTC staff worked with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Trade Commission and National Association of Insurance Commissioners on revising the rule, which goes into effect on May 28.

The final rule is available here.