News & Events –

Last Monday, in a speech delivered during the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) Public Policy conference in Washington, D.C., U.S. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), Chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, urged securities regulators to contact Congress and ask them to pass the Senior$afe Act of 2015, which would allow financial professionals to report suspected financial exploitation of seniors.

As we have discussed previously, the Department of Labor (DOL) released a new rule requiring anyone providing investment advice to retirement plans and accounts do so under the DOL’s new fiduciary standards.  These new standards are centered on protecting consumers from receiving investment advice that may be tainted by a conflict of interest on the part of the financial advisor (FA).

On May 5, 2016, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) proposed a new rule which would prohibit mandatory arbitration clauses that prevent consumers from filing class-action lawsuits against financial institutions.

On April 6, 2016, the Department of Labor (DOL) finalized its new rule and related exemptions requiring all who provide retirement investment advice to retirement plans and IRAs, extending to IRA rollovers, to abide by a "fiduciary" standard. The effective date of the rule is April 2017 with certain provisions phasing in through January 2018.

The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) released a new proposal Thursday aimed at meeting the incentive compensation requirements under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. The proposal, which was initially presented in 2011, seeks to lengthen deferred bonus compensation requirements and strengthen clawback provisions found in many large financial firms.

Last week the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners ("ACFE") issued its 2016 Report to the Nations on Occupational Fraud and Abuse ("Global Fraud Study"). In the Global Fraud Study, the ACFE analyzed 2,410 cases reported by Certified Fraud Examiners from January 2014 through October 2015 covering 114 countries and over $6.3 billion in losses.

The DOL has released its much anticipated fiduciary rule, and now the long process of determining its true impact on the securities industry can begin.

Please click here to read the new DOL Fiduciary rule:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2016-07924.pdf

This week, the SEC approved a proposed FINRA rule change that will require educational materials to be supplied to investors who are considering transferring their accounts in order to follow their representative as he/she switches from one member firm to another.

We may be as little as ten days away from the final form of the controversial fiduciary standard rule from the Department of Labor (DOL).

It seems like every week there is a new, record-breaking Anti-Money Laundering (“AML”) violation penalty issued by one regulator or another. RegTelligence®-your comprehensive source for regulatory intelligence - goes beyond the headlines and provides analytics on all AML-related enforcement actions involving financial services firms. 

The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) decided to leave interest rates unchanged at 0.25-0.50% after a two day meeting.

FINRA listed "senior and vulnerable investors" as a focus in its 2016 priority letter, as we blogged about previously, and the conclusion of a recent enforcement action supports the agency's focus in this area.

Last Friday FINRA announced that it had approved a proposal to require the disclosure of bond markups and markdowns for retail fixed income investors.

As foreshadowed in their 2016 Priority Letter, FINRA has begun examining--in the form of inquiry letters--the idea of a "culture of compliance."

In a new blog post, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York considers whether or not asset managers are vulnerable to ”run on the bank” scenarios and, more broadly, what the implications of those ”runs” might be for financial markets. The concern is that while open-end mutual funds may be holding sufficient levels of cash to meet the normal demand for daily redemptions, a sudden (or sustained) wave of redemptions may force them to liquidate holdings, perhaps at undesirable “fire sale” prices.