Wall Street’s top regulator proposed on Tuesday to end quarterly earnings reporting requirements for US-traded companies and allow them to switch to twice-annual reports. President Donald Trump floated the idea during his first term and it re-emerged as an administration priority last September. The Securities and Exchange Commission wants to give publicly traded companies the option to file their earnings twice a year, ending a 55-year-old requirement that US public companies share detailed financial results four times a year, within 45 days of the end of their fiscal quarter.

“The rigidity of the SEC’s rules has prevented companies and their investors from determining an interim reporting frequency that best serves their business needs and investors,” SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said in a statement Tuesday. The move is supported by a number of corporations and investment banks such as JPMorgan Chase, which argue that quarterly reporting places a heavy and costly burden on businesses.

They say it also promotes corporate short-termism at the expense of long-term planning and is a factor behind the sharp decline in the number of publicly traded companies in the US over the past decade.

However, some investors argue that the quarterly earnings requirement makes markets more transparent and less volatile, setting the stage for a financial industry tug-of-war as formal comments on the proposal flow to the SEC over the next 60 days. According to asset managers, companies will not necessarily take immediate advantage of the permission to switch to half-yearly reporting. The change will require some index providers to update the methodology for creating investment benchmarks. While the Nasdaq 100 is not required to report earnings to its constituents every quarter, there are quarterly reporting rules governing the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index. Nasdaq said in a white paper published last year that quarterly reporting is particularly burdensome for small and medium-sized companies that must allocate disproportionate time and resources to dealing with red tape.