In the early 2000s, SEC exams often meant dusting off physical binders and hunting through emails for attestations. A good compliance officer knew the art of printing PDFs and organizing labeled folders. But that era is over. With its latest release of three granular, data-heavy reports, the SEC isn’t suggesting that firms modernize. It’s modeling […]
You can’t outsource accountability—the words of Gurbir Grewal, SEC’s Director of Enforcement, landed like a drumbeat. What your firm says, builds, shares, or automates—if it reaches a client or touches decision-making—it’s yours to own. There’s no way around it. That same year, regulators issued over $5 billion in penalties. These weren’t edge cases. Most stemmed […]
The SEC’s 2024 enforcement numbers were never going to tell the whole story. Yes, the agency brought 26% fewer cases than the year before; but no one paying attention would call this a quiet year. Why? The Commission secured $8.2 billion in financial remedies, the highest total in its history. This wasn’t a strategy shift […]
The most valuable signal in compliance isn’t always what’s new; it’s what keeps showing up. That’s what makes FINRA’s 2025 Oversight Report so revealing. Underneath the new headlines (third-party risks, complex annuities, overnight trading) you’ll find a familiar story: firms still struggling with documentation, supervision, and suitability. But this year, the stakes feel sharper. Whether […]
When a city works well, you don’t notice. You step off the curb, and a car stops. You find shade on a hot street. Trash disappears. The lights turn red, and strangers obey. It feels like common sense… but actually, it’s design. The urban planner Jane Jacobs spent her career proving this. In 1961, she […]
When Compliance Goes Viral Remember this episode of The Office where Michael Scott declares bankruptcy by simply yelling, “I DECLARE BANKRUPTCY!” into the room? He’s dead serious. And dead wrong. Because that’s not how bankruptcy works. But that’s also how social media compliance feels for a lot of financial professionals: the assumption that you […]
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 […]
