The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority has officially given up on the idea of requiring firms to provide monthly account statements to customers.
            
On Tuesday, the self-regulator proposed an amended rule that would maintain the current quarterly schedule. The proposal follows the withdrawal two years ago of an earlier plan for monthly statements.
            
Finra’s new proposal (Regulatory Notice 14-35) will still permit carrying firms to send duplicate statements to other addresses or persons, but require written approval (not just oral approval) from the customer as well as concurrent delivery to the customer.
            
Finra first proposed monthly statement delivery in 2009, and revised the plan in 2011 after pushback from the brokerage and mutual fund industries, which were worried about the costs and operational difficulties of monthly statements. Finra’s amended proposal in 2011 relaxed some of the triggers for statement production by exempting activity like automatic monthly investments. But the revised plan still met with resistance, and Finra pulled the proposal in July 2012.
            
 With its current release, Finra is requesting feedback on a number of issues such as industry practices for sending account statements to incapacitated customers and their trusted advisors or guardians.
            
Comments are due to Finra by Oct. 31, 2014.