“Lots of people are being sold products,” said Jon Stein, founder and CEO of online investment company Betterment LLC. “The ‘advice’ is almost nonexistent.”

In TV ads, firms tout their employees as trusted advisors, so close to their clients that they get invited to weddings. In arbitration hearings, the same firms argue they merely have an obligation to sell “suitable” products to these purported pals. A Fiduciary Rule would radically change this business—just the threat of the rule altered industry business models.

But the deeply entrenched culture of financial advisory firms also needs an overhaul.

The Fiduciary Rule will permit advisors to continue getting commissions (unlike Australia, the U.K., and other countries that have banned them). But it requires they charge reasonable fees, clearly disclose them along with other conflicts of interest, and show clients the best products available.

If fees were more transparent, it would be easier to shop around, and more obvious whether your broker’s advice is worth what it costs. Also, with a duty to put client interests first, advisors could get sued for recommending the most egregious investments. That puts pressure on insurance companies and mutual fund companies to come up with better products that appeal to advisors on their own merits, creating a virtuous circle. “Product issuers are going to be forced to compete on product quality,” Egan said.

But those hopes smacked into a wall on Nov. 8. “The Fiduciary Rule as written may not align with President Trump’s deregulatory goals,” Acosta, Trump’s labor secretary, wrote in an Op-Ed. “This administration presumes that Americans can be trusted to decide for themselves what is best for them.”

Advocates for investors are worried that the Trump administration is getting ready to gut the Fiduciary Rule. Now that the SEC is weighing in, a big concern is that both agencies will team up to create a new, weaker rule that allows brokers to call themselves fiduciaries with “no meaningful protections to investors,” said Barbara Roper, director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America. “That would arguably be worse for investors than the status quo.”

Though while Wall Street lobbyists fight the Fiduciary Rule, some individual advisors say they embrace it. “The image of the investment professional who always prospers—whether the client sinks or swims—has got to change,” said Paul Smith, chief executive of the CFA Institute, which represents 142,000 investment professionals worldwide, including an estimated 13,000 client-facing financial advisors in the U.S. and Canada.

“A lot of the industry has used the rule to put its house in order,” Smith said. That includes charging less. “Everyone knows we overcharge for what we do. It’s obvious.”

Even a majority of investment industry executives around the world concede customers are “often sold inappropriate products,” a recent CFA Institute survey found.