Eighty-seven percent of investment advisors and dually registered advisors are undecided or have mixed feelings about the SEC's best-interest proposals, according to a survey by TD Ameritrade.
The survey findings, announced by TD Ameritrade during a policy briefing on Monday, come three weeks after the Securities and Exchange Commission released its proposals for applying a standard of conduct to investment advisors. More than 5,000 advisors participated in the survey last week, the company said.
TD Ameritrade, which services 11 million investors, $1.2 trillion in assets and 6,000 investment advisors, is working to analyze the proposals and make sure advisors know about all the salient, moving parts and opportunities they have to shape the proposals, TD Ameritrade Managing Director Skip Schweiss said. The proposals are in a public comment period until August 17.
The proposals could amount to some of the the biggest regulatory changes in decades if the SEC can get get them passed. The fact that key Republican Commissioner Michael Piwowar announced that he will be retiring at the July makes passage of the proposals dicey, but not impossible.
“There is a lot happening on standards of care these days ... and it feels to me like things may be coming to a head,” Schweiss said.
There are currently as many questions as there are answers regarding the SEC proposals, which isn’t surprising given the breadth and open-ended nature of some of the proposals (and their 1,800-plus footnotes). Some policy experts are scratching their head over the possible consumer confusion that could arise out of the SEC action.
It seems the SEC is straddling the fence when it comes to applying a fiduciary standard to advisors, said Duane Thompson, a senior policy analyst, Fi360, said of Regulation Best Interest. “I feel like the SEC is struggling here to try to placate both sides," he said. "If you are going to create a standard that sounds and looks very similar to the fiduciary duty for advisors, why not just carry out the mandate under Dodd Frank, [which] proposed the uniform fiduciary standard for both brokers and investment advisors?”
Titles is another area worth paying attention to, Thompson and Schweiss said. While the SEC proposal bars brokers from using the terms “advisor” and “adviser”—something many brokers and wirehouse firms have long done to imply they are fiduciaries—the proposal does not prohibit brokers from calling themselves a “financial planner” or “wealth manager,” said Thompson, who spoke at the TD Ameritrade policy seminar.
The use of titles by dually registered advisors could especially befuddle consumers, he said. Dually registered IAs are supposed to make clear they are an advisor with a fiduciary duty to investors when they are providing advice, and convey they are a broker who has a lesser, best-interest standard when working solely with a client’s brokerage account.
“It remains to be seen how a broker can describe a product without offering advice,” Thompson said. “The SEC “gives a lot of flexibility to the firm in describing when you are changing hats. ... I think that’s a grey area. And I think it’s very ripe for additional clarification.”