The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority stands ready to provide "technical assistance" to the Labor Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission as the two agencies coordinate a fiduciary rulemaking, said Robert Colby, FINRA's chief legal officer.
Speaking on a panel at the National Society of Compliance Professionals national conference in Washington Monday, Colby said that FINRA "would love to see a best-interest standard applied that was similarly applied across the broker-dealer world."
FINRA "commented" on Labor's rule that the commission was the right agency to craft a fiduciary standard, Colby said. FINRA "still thinks that. You don't get a lot of second opportunities in Washington, but the SEC has a second chance to come up with its own rule and work with the DOL to get to a coordinated standard."
So FINRA is "standing ready to provide any sort of technical assistance … we have a very good working relationship with DOL; we talk to them fairly often and with the SEC, too."
Colby added that if a "real best-interest standard that applied to broker-dealers" is promulgated, FINRA "would want the chance to go back and look at our rulebook, to see if the rules that we currently have that are intended to address specific conflicts needed to be done the exact same way."
