New York, NY, July 16, 2018 – SIFMA’s Municipal Securities Division announced today it will implement a new structure for its Master Agreement Among Underwriters (MAAU) for negotiated offerings of municipal securities by offering a signature page storage service. Participating firms will sign an acceptance letter to sign on to the multilateral SIFMA MAAU, and SIFMA will publish a list of firms that have accepted the terms of the MAAU on its website. SIFMA is also fully revising the MAAU for the first time in 16 years, and will release the new version in conjunction with the offering of this new structure.

The MAAU is a master contract designed to govern the relationship of underwriting syndicate members for municipal securities underwriting transactions. There were 10,584 new publicly offered municipal securities issuance transactions in the US in 2017. In nearly all those transactions involving an underwriting syndicate, the relationship among underwriting syndicate members was governed by the SIFMA MAAU.

The new structure is intended to facilitate transparency as to which broker dealers have accepted, or agreed to adhere to the MAAU, and to reduce compliance burdens on firms who will no longer need to execute and store bilateral signature pages for every syndicate member.

“Storing the MAAU signature pages makes it easier for syndicate members to determine whether other firms have accepted the terms of the MAAU,” said Leslie Norwood, managing director, associate general counsel and co-head of SIFMA’s Municipal Securities Division.  “When multiplied by the number of deals using the MAAU, this results in significant time savings for dealers and greater efficiency when executing deals.”

When entering into an underwriting syndicate for municipal securities, it is currently necessary for municipal securities syndicate members or others involved in an issuance transaction to verify that other firms in the syndicate have executed the 2002 MAAU, which can entail time and labor. If the firms have not executed the 2002 MAAU with each other, then they either need to do so or execute the 1997 SIFMA MAAU on a transaction-specific basis.

Going forward, SIFMA’s letter storage service for collection and cataloging of acceptance letters for the new 2018 MAAU will allow syndicate members to quickly and easily determine what other firms have accepted the terms of the 2018 MAAU.

Features of the service include:

• SIFMA will store conformed copies of executed 2018 MAAU acceptance letters on its Web site at www.sifma.org/mmaau, along with other pertinent information, such as the effective date of acceptance. The 2018 MAAU acceptance letters will be accessible publicly without charge and without the need for an account or password.
• SIFMA will charge a fee of $1000 per acceptance letter for this service, which will be available to all municipal securities underwriters. The fee covers storage of the 2018 MAAU acceptance letter for as long as that version of the 2018 MAAU is in use and is intended to offset SIFMA’s legal costs related to the 2018 MAAU.
• There is no charge to withdraw from the MAAU by delivery of a 2018 MAAU withdrawal letter.
• The 2018 MAAU acceptance letters on the SIFMA website include the names of the executing firms but would not include personally identifiable information associated with any individual, including the officer who signed the 2018 MAAU acceptance letter, unless a firm would like to post relevant contact information. For identifying purposes, the acceptance letters would also include a firm’s legal entity identifier, if they have one and provide it on their 2018 MAAU acceptance letter.
• Electronic copies of the signed 2018 MAAU acceptance letters will be available only to SIFMA staff. If a user wants to view the actual signed copy, that request would be addressed by SIFMA staff in consultation with the relevant signatory firm.
• The initial effective date will be September 4.

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SIFMA is the voice of the U.S. securities industry. We represent the broker-dealers, banks and asset managers whose nearly 1 million employees provide access to the capital markets, raising over $2.5 trillion for businesses and municipalities in the U.S., serving clients with over $18.5 trillion in assets and managing more than $67 trillion in assets for individual and institutional clients including mutual funds and retirement plans. SIFMA, with offices in New York and Washington, D.C., is the U.S. regional member of the Global Financial Markets Association (GFMA). For more information, visit http://www.sifma.org.