SROIIA Launches State Web Tool in Anticipation of ‘Switch’

The Self-Regulatory Organization for Independent Investment Advisers, which was founded by two University of Mississippi School of Law students last March, announced Wednesday that it had created a web tool to help advisors wade through the registration requirements for each state.

The Dodd-Frank Act requires investment advisors with assets under management of between $25 million and $100 million to switch from federal to state registration by mid-2012.

In anticipation of the “switching” of advisors, the web tool allows advisors to click on a state to find a summary of the state’s registration requirements and links to the necessary forms. “Prior to the release of the web tool, independent investment advisors would have to search through each state’s complex statutes and securities acts to find the registration information,” said Adam Hynick, VP of state affairs & outreach at SROIIA, in a statement announcing the web tool.

D. Tyler Roberts, co-chief executive officer and co-founder of SROIIA, told AdvisorOne that while SROIIA has “no intentions of becoming a compliance firm, SROIIA is developing a SRO model for advisors,” and “one aspect of SROIIA’s model is its dedication to helping advisors stay compliant, instead of simply writing the rules and enforcing them.”

Roberts says he and other SROIIA execs were researching state registration requirements and processes for use in SROIIA’s own registration model and “found that the information was difficult to locate and wade through.” After compiling the information, he says, “we thought that it may be beneficial for advisors to have access to this information for compliance” and developed the web tool.

“We suspect that there will be other tools like this to follow as we continue to develop our SRO model,” Roberts adds.