States could be the next battleground over the fiduciary debate.

The approval by the SEC of its long-awaited Regulation Best Interest on Wednesday may have put to rest some of the regulatory uncertainty, but officials at TD Ameritrade are still watching state efforts to impose higher standards for advisors.

“We’re concerned about there being 52 standards out there,” said Tom Nally, president of TD Ameritrade Institutional. “What a challenge that would be for advisors and broker-dealers.”

Nevada in particular had a proposal that was “overly broad,” Nally told Financial Advisor during the firm’s Elite Linc conference in Laguna Niguel, Calif.

The impact could be felt especially on the retail side. TD Ameritrade serves “an enormous base of clients. We call them empowered clients, but they’re basically do-it-yourself people who want to be in control, and we have a ton of educational content and research tools we make available to them," Nally said. "Based on some interpretations [of Nevada’s proposal], that would be considered fiduciary advice.

“We’ll see if Reg BI causes the states to take a bit of a step back,” Nally added.

The firm and some of its advisors have been concerned that the new rule won’t clear up confusion among investors, but Nally said the impact will depend on how Reg BI is implemented.

“What does the language look like, and that four-page disclosure document? ... Is the language going to be simplistic so people can understand it? Or overly complex?”

Meanwhile, Nally hopes some of the confusion over TD’s own channel conflict has been cleared up. Advisors had been uncertain about how much competition they might face from the firm’s expanded retail branch network, but in February at the firm’s all-hands RIA meeting, Nally and Tim Hockey, TD Ameritrade president and chief executive, sought to put those worries to rest.  

“There was a bit of ambiguity as to what the path forward was in the branches,” Nally said. “There were some questions [like] are we going to start to have advisors in the branches managing books of business? We were trying to figure that out three or four years ago, then the Scottrade opportunity came up, which put that strategic review on hold. Once that (Scottrade) acquisition was done, we went back to the strategy table and really did a deep dive into how we wanted to compete [in the retail space]. We came out pretty strongly about not competing with advisors and being focused on that empowered client on the retail side.”

The RIA custody business is clearly a growth business and the firm had to make sure to protect that franchise, Nally explained.

“And our legacy in the retail space has been delivering great technology solutions for people who want to be empowered and in control, and that’s where we figure we’ll be laser focused on competing,” he said.

“What we’re not going to do is play the role of advisor. There are people who want to retain in control who may want some advice along the way. [But] if somebody says, this is too complicated for me, I don’t feel confident in doing this, I need someone to do it for me, [that’s] where we hand it off to one of our RIAs,” he said.

And that’s where an RIA with a robust wealth management offering can meet the need.

But the breadth of financial issues RIA firms are handling today has brought into focus how they charge. TD officials have been outspoken about the need to consider models other than AUM pricing.

So far, though, the AUM model dominates. “It’s one of those things where everyone is entrenched in their existing model,” Nally said. “But I think over time we are seeing people starting to explore.”

A survey of TD’s top-performing firms found a high percentage of them charged minimum fees, have separated financial planning fees from other types of fees and showed “an appetite for billing on total net worth rather than investable assets,” Nally said. “If you think about it, advisors are being pushed to do more and more things for their clients, so why are you billing on only one component of that value proposition?”

The more services advisors add—and they’ll have to in order to compete--the more it’s going to require them to look at the ways they price, Nally said.