Launching your own registered investment adviser (RIA) firm is an exciting, but complicated, new chapter in your career as a financial professional. From drafting the ADV to communicating with regulators, registering a new RIA firm can be an overwhelming task. Although online document template services are cheap and simple to use, those services don’t come without their drawbacks. This past …
Advisors pursuing customer dispute expungements before September will pay a fraction of the new cost.
As published in the Federal Register, on June 1, 2020, the SEC approved FINRA’s proposed Rule changes to the customer dispute expungement process. Release No. 34—88945; File No. SR—FINRA—2020—005. In short, the following provisions of the recently-approved Rule apply to all matters in which expungement of a customer dispute disclosure is requested as a claim or counterclaim: The minimum filing …
Will old investor complaints have to be disclosed after the SEC’s Reg BI takes effect?
Will investment advisors with customer disputes over ten years old have to disclose them on their Form ADV under the new SEC Regulation Best Interest Rule that’s taking effect after June 30, 2020? The short answer is, yes. Advisors will be required to disclose these old investor complaints on their ADV Part 3.
FINRA Is Jacking Up The Cost Of Expungement For Brokers
Proposed rule changes in front of the SEC exponentially increase the minimum fees for FINRA disclosure expungement from $50 to $1,575. So, a typical expungement case would ultimately jump from $768 to well over $10,000. As we previously warned, on February 7, 2020, FINRA issued a Rule Filing Status Report (SR-FINRA-2020-005). The 219-page status report provides some insight into the …
The Stakes for a Clean Record are Now Even Higher
Effective June 30, 2020, the SEC is enforcing sweeping reform, titled “Regulation Best Interest”. What does the SEC’s Regulation Best Interest mean for brokers? The New RequirementsEffective June 30, 2020, the SEC is enforcing sweeping reform, entitled “Regulation Best Interest: The Broker-Dealer Standard of Conduct,” commonly referred to as “Reg BI.” At the same time, the SEC is also enforcing the …
A Stacked Deck: Inside the 2019 FINRA New Customer Dispute Expungement Process
The House always wins. FINRA has filed rule changes to strip financial advisors of a critical right. News that expungement of qualified customer disputes was under fire from the regulators first became known on December 6, 2017; when FINRA published Regulatory Notice 17-42. Since then, the industry has been anxiously waiting for the FINRA Board of Governors to tell the industry precisely …
FINRA’s Focus on Advisors With Customer Disputes
We’ve known for some time that FINRA ranks their brokers based upon negative disclosures on their Form U4 and CRD. However, that information has never been released to the public en masse due to instances where many non-adjudicated claims have never actually proven a sales-practice violation by the advisor. A firm that represents customers in drumming up these investor complaints, …
AdvisorLaw Reaches 50 FINRA Customer Dispute Expungement Awards in 2017
AdvisorLaw has just reached an important and impressive milestone in the financial advisor industry. We have just reached our 50th winning award for customer dispute expungement in 2017 through FINRA’s Rule 2080 arbitration – and it’s only September! Why is this a big deal? Well, there are two very important reasons that will give you a sense of just how big of an …