The Series 99 (Operations Professional) exam has 50 scored questions (plus 5 unscored) in 90 minutes, a passing score of 68, and a $100 fee. It requires firm sponsorship plus the SIE, and it's the registration for back-office and middle-office professionals. Before studying, check one thing: holders of certain other registrations (like the Series 7 or 24) can claim the Operations Professional registration without taking the 99 at all.
The Series 99 registers you as an Operations Professional — FINRA's qualification for the people who make a broker-dealer actually run. FINRA requires it (or an eligible substitute registration) for "covered persons": senior operations management and anyone with decision-making authority over covered functions like customer onboarding, receipt and delivery of funds and securities, account transfers, settlement, reconciliation, margin, stock loan and securities lending, prime brokerage, and books and records. Paired with the SIE co-requisite and firm sponsorship, it's the operations world's equivalent of the sales side's top-off exams.
One rule saves many candidates the trouble entirely: FINRA allows holders of certain eligible registrations — including the Series 7 and Series 24 among others — to request the Operations Professional registration without examination or fee. If you already hold a qualifying license, confirm eligibility with your firm's registration team before opening a study plan.
| Scored questions | 50 (plus 5 unscored pretest) |
| Time limit | 90 minutes |
| Format | Multiple choice |
| Passing score | 68 (34 of 50) |
| Estimated pass rate | ~71% (industry estimate; FINRA doesn't publish) |
| Fee | $100 |
| Prerequisites | SIE (co-requisite) + firm sponsorship |
| Delivery | Prometric center or online proctored |
The outline splits into two functions with a lopsided weight:
| Function | Scored questions | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Securities industry & broker-dealer operations knowledge | 35 | 70% |
| 2. Professional conduct & ethical considerations | 15 | 30% |
Function 1 walks the operational lifecycle: products and market structure basics, account opening and documentation (including AML/KYC), trade capture through clearance and settlement, corporate actions, margin, transfers (ACATS), custody and control (including SEA 15c3-3 concepts), and books-and-records obligations. Function 2 covers the conduct layer: customer protection, confidentiality, escalation duties, and the regulatory framework around operations. The exam is broad rather than deep — the challenge is coverage, not complexity.
By FINRA standards, gentle: a 68 passing bar, 108 seconds per question, and no math beyond basics. The candidates who fail it are usually experienced operations staff who studied their own desk and winged the rest — the exam deliberately samples the full operational lifecycle, so a settlements specialist gets margin and transfer-agent questions and vice versa. The 30% ethics function is also a quiet score-mover: it's the most test-like material (escalation duties, red flags, confidentiality boundaries) and the least like anyone's day job.
Plan 30–50 hours over 3–5 weeks. Experienced ops professionals should invert their instincts: skim your own function, drill everyone else's, and give the conduct/ethics outline genuine reps. Recent SIE passers have an edge — the industry-knowledge foundation overlaps meaningfully, and the 99 adds the operational depth.
Breadth exams punish passive review in a specific way: everything reads as familiar because it's adjacent to your job, and none of it is reliably producible because it isn't your job. Retrieval practice exposes those gaps early — being forced to produce the settlement cycle, the transfer timeline, the escalation duty — while spaced repetition keeps ten operational domains simultaneously warm and immediate correction of misses stops plausible confusions from surviving.
Trelos is built entirely around those techniques. It teaches each concept, drills it in FINRA's style, and schedules your reviews so the full operational lifecycle — not just your corner of it — is producible on exam day.
Start the Series 99 on Trelos — freeNo credit card. Feel the retention engine work in your first session.With the SIE and Series 99 on file, your firm completes the Operations Professional registration and you're qualified for covered-function authority. Career-wise, the 99 is a floor rather than a ceiling: ops professionals moving toward supervision commonly add the Series 24 (which itself makes the 99 redundant going forward), and those crossing to the revenue side pursue the Series 7 path.