IPA Meets with NASAA and New Jersey Securities Officials on Fiduciary Rules

Members and friends,

I wanted to share an update on recent IPA advocacy efforts.

Earlier this week, Tony and I attended NASAA’s Annual Conference in Austin, Texas. We met with NASAA staff and individual state securities regulators including NASAA’s Past President, Michael Pieciak (Vermont’s Commissioner of Financial Regulation), NASAA’s President Christopher Gerold (New Jersey Securities Bureau Chief) and NASAA’s President-Elect, Lisa Hopkins (West Virginia’s Senior Deputy Securities Commissioner and General Counsel). In addition to discussing issues relevant to the PDI industry with our regulators, we participated in NASAA’s Corporation Finance Section Forum and its ABA State Regulation of Securities Committee Meeting.

Yesterday, myself and Mark Quinn, Director of Regulatory Affairs at Cetera Financial Group, along with a small group of industry coalition members, participated in a meeting with Paul Rodriguez, Acting Director of the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs, and senior staff of the New Jersey Bureau of Securities within the Division of Consumer Affairs, to discuss the proposed New Jersey fiduciary rulemaking. As addressed in our letter we provided concrete recommendations with regard to the “ongoing duty” language in the brokerage context and the “best of” standard used in the proposal. We continued to encourage the Bureau to allow formal stakeholder engagement through a working group process as it develops and finalizes its fiduciary rule.

As many of you may have seen, on Tuesday seven states and the District of Columbia sued the SEC over its Regulation Best Interest rulemaking, which was followed by a second lawsuit by XY Planning Network, a coalition of fee-only financial planners. Below is recent news coverage on the lawsuits, which the IPA will be monitoring closely and working alongside industry coalition partners in order to support the SEC.