While investment advisors worry the SEC will water down the investment advisor fiduciary standard, for more than a decade the broker-dealer industry has successfully fended off attempts by regulators to add a fiduciary duty to their regulations. They’ve also successfully fended off outright prohibitions on conflicted transactions, lobbying instead to address conflicts via investor disclosures.
On that front, the Financial Services Institute, Sifma and a number of other plaintiffs celebrated a major victory in March when they won their lawsuit to vacate the Department of Labor’s fiduciary standard for retirement accounts in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on the grounds that the DOL had overstepped its authority.