The CFA Institute* sent a letter to SEC yesterday urging three approaches to address investor confusion, enhance investor protections and limit inappropriate advising by broker-dealers. The Institute hopes the SEC will clarify that only registered investment advisers (RIAs) can provide personalized investment advice.
The CFA Institute commented that "Investors deserve to know the standard under which advice providers operate when providing them with personalized investment advice. Yet, while recognized as a problem for years, neither the SEC nor the DOL has successfully implemented a rule to address this issue."
Numerous bipartisan reports in previous years have called for similar action (see 2011 SEC study calling for Uniform Fiduciary Standard and the 2015 Presidential Report on conflicted investment advice).
Read more about this on the CFA Institute's blog.
*The CFA Institute is a global, not-for-profit professional association of more than 155,000 investment analysts, advisers, portfolio managers,and other investment professionals in 165 countries [Chartered Financial Analyst® (CFA®) designation]