Advisors are less aware of the Securities and Exchange Commission's best-interest proposals now than they were of the Labor Department's fiduciary rule proposal in 2016.
So says Fidelity research, which also finds that not only do 40% of advisors aware of the proposals not plan on acting until there is further clarification, some 78% of advisors say they'll need at least some help assessing and evaluating the proposals.
Opinion is pretty evenly divided on whether the proposals will have a positive or negative impact, with a third of advisors on either side and the remaining third in the middle on the matter. And while 62% of advisors expect that a new SEC rule for standards of conduct will be put in place, their efforts to prepare for the now-defunct Labor rule have put them at an advantage.
In fact, advisors are likely to leverage a number of the steps they already took to work toward compliance with the Labor rule, and they expect to be able to use several of them to better prepare for future SEC regs.
