The Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday proposed a new rule to prohibit registered investment advisors from outsourcing certain services and functions without conducting due diligence and monitoring of the service providers.
"Though investment advisers have used third-party service providers for decades, their increasing use has led staff to make several recommendations to ensure advisers that use them continue to meet their obligations to the investing public," SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said Wednesday during the open meeting.
"When an investment adviser outsources work to third parties, it may lower the adviser's costs, but it does not change an adviser's core obligations to its clients," he explained.
The proposal would require advisors to satisfy specific due diligence elements "before retaining a service provider that will perform certain advisory services or functions, and to subsequently carry out periodic monitoring of the service provider's performance."
Karen Barr, president and CEO of the Investment Adviser Association in Washington, told ThinkAdvisor Wednesday in an email that IAA's initial review of the SEC's proposed new oversight requirements for services outsourced by investment advisors is that they "are overly burdensome and prescriptive and fail to recognize how little leverage firms have over many service providers."
The proposal, Barr added, "is also not adequately tailored to the range of firms it covers, including smaller advisers. It is also apparent that the SEC again has not appropriately considered the cumulative impact of its wave of new proposals on advisory firms of all sizes, nor has it provided sufficient time for meaningful feedback on these sweeping changes."
IAA noted that while it's unclear from the 232-page rule which "covered" outsourced services the SEC is targeting, the agency's plan explicitly excludes services and functions such as clerical, ministerial, utility and general office functions or services.
The new proposed rule would establish an oversight framework across SEC-registered advisors that outsource a "covered function," that is, a function or service that:
- is necessary to provide advisory services in compliance with the federal securities laws, and
- if not performed or performed negligently, would be reasonably likely to cause a material negative impact on the adviser's clients or on the adviser's ability to provide investment advisory services.
These functions, the agency said, can include providing investment guidelines, portfolio management, models related to investment advice, indexes or trading services or software.
