On March 19, 2025, the SEC dropped an update that compliance officers have been waiting for since the Marketing Rule’s enforcement wave began. The new FAQs target the thorniest part of the rule: performance data. It’s not a sweeping rewrite. It’s a set of high-stakes clarifications—delivered with language that should make any adviser’s legal team […]
Introduction: The Exam That Shaped a Decade In 2007, the SEC’s examination of a midsize advisory firm uncovered a chain of internal miscommunications that, while not fraudulent, revealed a failure to supervise. It was a turning point. The firm, which had prided itself on ethical transparency, realized too late that good intentions don’t matter […]
Introduction: The Real Cost of Scrambling In 2017, Equifax failed to patch a known vulnerability. As a result, 147 million people had their personal data exposed. It wasn’t a high-tech heist, just an ordinary oversight. The fine was $700 million. It’s a lot. But the cost in public trust was harder to measure. This […]
Introduction: An Industry on the Move FutureProof Citywide 2025 brought the RIA community face-to-face with the pace of its own transformation. The conversations pulsing through the boardwalk in Miami Beach were focused, urgent, and refreshingly practical: How do we scale without breaking our systems? How do we adopt the right tech without losing the […]
If you want to understand where compliance is headed, follow the crowd to Washington, D.C. – or more specifically, to the IAA Compliance Conference at the Marriott Marquis. In 2025, it wasn’t just a meeting of the minds; it was the epicenter of regulatory insights, AI debates, vendor management war stories, and more acronyms than […]
Compliance in the RIA world has always been like The Matrix: everywhere, shaping how firms operate, defining what’s possible. No testimonials, no performance advertising, no client endorsements. But just like Neo learning the truth about his world, RIAs not long ago woke up to a new reality. The SEC’s 2021 Marketing Rule has rewritten the […]
Introduction: Opening Moves: Setting the Compliance Board In 2024, the SEC charged 26 financial institutions, including major broker-dealers and investment advisers, with widespread recordkeeping failures, resulting in combined penalties exceeding $390 million. It started as minor inconsistencies but quickly snowballed into a full-scale compliance failure, resulting in painful financial and reputational damages. This story […]
Records Rule the World: Why Compliance Starts (and Ends) With Documentation As pretentious as it might sound, history is written by those who keep the records. Contracts carved into Mesopotamian clay tablets laid the groundwork for commerce. The Medici bankers revolutionized accounting with double-entry bookkeeping. Today, regulatory frameworks like SEC Rule 204-2, MiFID II […]
From handshake deals to compliance marathons: How RIAs navigate today’s regulatory landscape In the early days of financial advice, relationships ruled the game. A handshake and a reputation were often enough to build a thriving practice. Compliance? Ah, a secondary concern at best. But as the industry matured, so did the regulations, transforming the role […]
Introduction: Why Manual Compliance is a Risky Game Compliance officers might be getting chills, as it’s only the beginning of the year and the SEC has already gotten the party started, handing out millions in fines to investment firms for compliance failures. Some as simple as poor record-keeping or using unauthorized messaging apps. In […]
