FINRA, SEC to Get New Execs in 2016

By Melanie Waddell

February 01, 2016 at 07:00 PM

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New faces will be showing up this year at FINRA and the SEC.

Richard Ketchum, FINRA's CEO, is set to retire. Ketchum told IA in early January that while he would prefer to hand over his CEO duties in the summer, he will stay on until the
FINRA Board's search for a new CEO is completed.

The FINRA board's search process — which is internal and external — just started in December, and it "tends to be a multi-month process," Ketchum said. So any news on his replacement wouldn't come till spring "at the earliest."

The SEC is set to get two new commissioners, Hester Peirce and Lisa Fairfax. Mercatus fellow Peirce replaces SEC Commissioner Daniel Gallagher, a Republican, who left his post on Oct. 2; Gallagher's term was to expire in 2016. George Washington University law professor Fairfax replaces Luis Aguilar, a Democrat, who left the agency on Dec. 1.

Peirce, a senior research fellow at George Mason University's Mercatus Center, has also served as a lawyer for the Senate Banking Committee, and is a verbal opponent of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law. Peirce would also likely oppose a fiduciary rule issued by the SEC that imposes the Investment Adviser Act fiduciary duty on brokers.

Fairfax is the Leroy Sorenson Merrifield Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School. Prior to joining the GW law faculty, she was a professor of law and director of the Business Law Program at the University of Maryland School of Law.

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