News & Events –

This Monday's SEC Daily Digest Bulletin included a transcript of a Q&A session between SEC  Chair Mary Jo White and Steven Bochner, Chair of the Securities Regulation Institute.

The New York Department of Financial Services, which oversees some of the largest banks in the world, may soon find itself in opposition to its normal allies: compliance officers.

We have blogged previously about the rise of automated investing advice as a service offering, and about the joint release that FINRA and the SEC put out regarding how to use these automated tools. 

The 2015 RegtelligenceTM numbers are in! Our financial regulatory intelligence database, compiled from over 30,000 investment advisors, dually-registered firms and affiliates with over 10 years of data covering 290 financial regulators worldwide, reveals some very interesting insights.

The SEC's whistleblower program, as outlined in the Dodd-Frank Act, has a very simple origin story. Work by an outside analyst, which was presented repeatedly to the commission and could have brought the Madoff fraud to light, was repeatedly ignored.

Last week we got FINRA's 2016 priorities, and this week the SEC announced theirs.

New Areas of Focus Include Liquidity Controls, Public Pension Advisers, Product Promotion, Exchange-Traded Funds and Variable Annuities

FINRA released its priorities for 2016 this week, with many new priorities appearing on this year’s list. While many of the same (or similar) target areas appear, we wanted to highlight a few new ones that may be of interest to you.

FINRA’s 2016 Regulatory and Examination Priorities Letter identifies both new areas of focus as well as areas of recurring concern. We first address three broad issues—culture, conflicts of interest and ethics; supervision, risk management and controls; and liquidity— and then discuss more narrowly focused topics. As always, there is a tension between our desire to be brief with this letter while also addressing the many areas of potential concern that can arise across the breadth of the securities industry.